





Library of The Theological Seminary 


PRINCETON ° NEW JERSEY 


C=) 


PRESENTED BY 


Thomas C. Davies 





Land of All Nations 


“~ 
a 
‘/~ 


By Margaret R.’Seebach “M4.0g)cAl Sis 
Author of Martin of Mansfield, Missionary Kapa 
Milestones, Other People’s Children 


Published jointly by 
Council of Women for Home Missions 
and 
Missionary Education Movement 
New York 


COPYRIGHT, 1024, BY THE 
COUNCIL OF WOMEN FOR HOME MISSIONS: 
AND 
MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT 
OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 


Printed in the United States of America 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 
I A Stupent or Two Booxs 
George W. Carver 
II A MoprerRn CoLumBuSs 
Constantino Panunzio 


III Tue HAnp or A HELPER . 
Loo Lin 


IV A Soxprer oF PEACE . 
Teizo Kawai 


V A DAUGHTER oF LEBANON . A 
Layyah A. Barakat 


VI A MESSENGER oF Goop NEws . 
Peter Halenda 


VII A Sarninc Licut 
Ambrosio C. Gonzales 


VIII A SHUTTLE oF THE GREAT LooM 
Edward A. Steiner 


PAGE 


118 


134 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 
George Washington ‘Carver (000° Sa a ao 
Constantine: Panwinzio 9 )05' 9.) “AD at eens 
Loo Lin . y : : : ‘ ‘ : 3 > ee 
Japanese Union Church, Los Angeles, Cal... . . 58 
Layyah A. Barakat Aa hI keg py | tase 4 it 
A Slavic missionary among miners in Pennsylvania . 106 
Ambrosio C.'Gonzales J) BAe pi alk ee 
Ectward- Ai Steir yoo egal ats Mey ene ee 


PREFACE 


Wuat is America? and whom do we mean when we 
speak of Americans? Are they those who were born 
on the soil of the United States? But these speak 
many languages, and have varying customs and ideas. 
Do we mean those whose ancestors came here a few 
generations further back? But where shall we draw 
the line, and how long does it take to make an Ameri- 
can? Do we mean those who have been here from 
the beginning, whose history shows no former life as a 
race in any other land? ‘Then we should have to ad- 
mit that, as far as we know, the red man is the only 
real American. 

Perhaps we can all agree in saying that real Ameri- 
cans are those who have the spirit and ideals of Amer- 
ica. But where did America get these ideals? They 
were not brought here by a single group of people. 
They did not come from one race alone, but are made 
up of the ideals of many nations. And the greatest one 
of all—the one we call the American spirit of equality 
and brotherhood—did not even come from the Anglo- 
Saxon race, but from a Man who went about long ago 
in a little country called Judea, and taught people to 
love and help one another. 

The sketches in this book are stories of real Ameri- 
cans, although they are of different races. Each of 
them has brought the best gifts of his race to contribute 

Vv 


vi PREFACE 


to the making of the true America; and all of them have 
that highest ideal, and are serving and helping others 
in the name of the Christ who brought a message of 
good-will to all people. If we are able to catch their 
spirit, and are willing to work with them—and with 
many others like them—to make this “Land of All 
Nations” a land of Christian brotherhood, we shail 
come one day to understand what St. John meant when 
he saw the vision of the Perfect Country, and wrote, 
“They shall bring the glory and honour of the nations 
into it.” 
MARGARET R, SEEBACH 


PHILADELPHIA, OHIO 
March, 1924 


Land of All Nations 


I 
A STUDENT OF TWO BOOKS 


t 2 Sa pee had settled over the village of Dia- 

mond Grove, Missouri, and over the surrounding 
farm-land. It was at the close of the Civil War, and 
though the slaves had been freed, most of them still 
remained on the lands of their former owners. So the 
farms had yet their Negro quarters, overrunning with 
bright-eyed, kinky-haired children, who were now cud- 
dled together like little brown birds in their nests, for- 
getting the day in sleep. 

Suddenly there rang through the air the shriek of a 
woman and the wailing of a tiny baby. Moses Carver, 
owner of the farm, sprang from his bed and ran out 
toward the flash of torches which gleamed from the 
Negro quarters. A sobbing boy ran almost into his 
arms. Mr. Carver caught him. 

“What is it, James?” he asked. 

“De night-riders . . . dey done took mammy an’ de 
baby!” sobbed the child. ‘“Dey’s lookin’ for me now, 
I ’spect!”’ 

“Come, I’ll take you where they will not get you!” 
said the kind farmer, soothingly. ‘Out here in the 
woods I know a place where they won’t find you. We 
must get back your mother and the baby, too. Poor 
Mary! there they go with her.” 


EF 


2 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


And crouching in the underbrush, the white man and 
the Negro boy watched the torches disappear. 

The marauders rode off into Arkansas with Mary 
Carver and her baby, who were called, as slaves usually 
were, by the name of their owner. In those regions, 
remote from the enforcement of law, little attention 
was paid to the edict that had freed the slaves, and 
the raiders found no difficulty in selling the robust 
young Negro woman. It was a different matter with 
the puny baby, who had developed whooping-cough on 
the journey and was so nearly dead that the raiders 
thought he could not live more than a few days. 

As a consequence, when a man sent by Mr. Carver 
arrived with a fine race-horse and some money to buy 
back Mary and her baby, he found that the mother 
had disappeared with her new owner, and that only the 
sick baby could be rescued. The man knew Mr: Carver 
well enough to feel sure that he would not want the 
child to die; so he ransomed the frail scrap of human- — 
ity with the blooded horse, valued at three hundred 
dollars. 

Mr. and Mrs. Carver had never liked the idea of 
owning slaves, but that was the only way they could 
get farm help. “And we will be good to them,” they 
said, “when other owners might not be.” Accordingly, 
James and the ransomed little brother were brought up 
by the good farmer and his wife as if they were their 
own children. 

As soon as the baby could toddle alone, he began to 
show an interest in growing things. Wherever he went, 


A STUDENT OF TWO BOOKS 3 


he was never seen without a bunch of something green 
in his little fist—flowers or weeds, it made no difference 
so long as it was something that had grown out of the 
ground. If anyone but the Carvers tried to take his 
treasure from him, he fought like a small wildcat. He 
inherited his mother’s hot temper. He inherited some- 
thing else from her too. No matter how much to her 
disadvantage the truth might be, she had never been 
known to tell a lie, and perhaps it was because her 
little son had never been known to tell one either that 
he was nicknamed ‘‘George Washington.” 

Of his father he knew nothing, except that he had 
been the property of a neighboring farmer named 
Grant, and that, while hauling wood with an ox team, 
he had fallen under the wagon, which passed over him 
and killed him. Mr. Carver supplied the place of a 
father to James and George, training them with care. 

In this kindly atmosphere, George continued to love 
everything that lived and grew. Besides his precious 
weeds, he came to love animal life also, and usually 
carried a toad or two in his pockets. He even took 
these odd playmates to bed with him until Mrs. Carver 
made a rule that he must turn all his pockets inside 
out before he could come into the house at night. 

“T literally lived in the woods,” he says, recalling 
these days. “I wanted to know about every strange 
stone, flower, insect, bird, or beast, but no one could 
tell me about them.” His only book was an old speller 
which he knew by heart; but it could not answer his 
questions, and his wish for an education grew daily. 


4 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


After ten years on the Carver farm, the elder brother, 
James, went to live in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Shortly 
after his brother’s departure, George also left the farm, 
with the consent of the Carvers, to attend a school for 
Negroes in a town about eight miles away. Here he 
remained until he had learned all the little school could 
teach him, sometimes lodging in the cabins of friendly 
Negroes, and sometimes sleeping in the open fields or 
in a stable. 

When two years had passed, there came an oppor- 
tunity to go to Fort Scott, Kansas, with a family who 
were moving there. They traveled in a wagon drawn 
by mules, but the slow rate of progress made the jour- 
ney only the more interesting to the nature-loving boy. 
Every new plant along the way, every strange bird or 
curious stone, was a fresh delight to him. 

For six or seven years he went to school at Fort 
Scott, supporting himself by doing cooking and all 
sorts of housework in various families. 

“Here,” he says, “I began to feel renewed gratitude 
toward Mrs. Carver, who taught me to cook and to sew 
and make embroidery, which I have done ever since. 
They were the means of supporting myself through 
many hard years.” Indeed, he has a gift for beautiful 
embroidery, and of his crochet-work he has a wonder- 
ful collection that includes more than a hundred origi- 
nal patterns. 

At the age of nineteen he went back to Missouri to 
spend some time with the Carvers. He was so small at 
this time that he rode on a half-fare ticket, and the 


A STUDENT OF TWO BOOKS 5 


conductor expressed doubts about his being old enough 
to travel so far alone! A year later he began to grow 
rapidly, and shot up to six feet before he was twenty- 
one. ; 
After a happy summer with his old friends, he re- 
turned to Minneapolis, Kansas, to finish his high-school 
work. He opened a laundry here to support himself, 
and soon had all the work he could do. 

During this time the sad news came to him that his 
brother James had died of smallpox. ‘I was conscious 
as never before that I was left alone,” he says; “but I 
trusted God and pushed ahead.” 

He graduated from high school and applied for en- 
trance to an Iowa college. His application was ac- 
cepted, and he spent almost his last cent to reach the 
_ place. But when the president saw that he was a 
Negro, he refused to admit him into the college. The 
boy stayed on in town and, in order to accumulate 
more funds, opened a laundry which was well patron- 
ized by the students as soon as they learned his story. 

The following spring he went to Winterset, Iowa, 
as cook in a large hotel. 

It was in Winterset that George attended service one 
Sunday evening in a church for white people, taking 
an inconspicuous seat in a rear pew. ‘The next day 
a fine-looking man called at the hotel and asked him to 
go home with him, saying that his wife wanted to see 
him. To his surprise, he found that the gentleman’s 
wife was the soprano soloist of the choir he had heard 
the night before. Still greater was his astonishment 


6 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


on being told that she had heard his voice as he sang 
in the church, and had been greatly attracted by its 
quality. Leading the way to the piano, she asked him 
to sing for her, and after several songs it was arranged 
that he should come to her house once a week for vocal 
instruction. From that time on, Mr. and Mrs. Mill- 
holland have been among George Carver’s warmest 
and most helpful friends. He formed the habit of 
going to their home each evening and telling them what 
he had been doing all day. After this recital, Mrs. 
Millholland would laugh and say, ‘‘Who ever heard of 
any one person doing half so many things!” 

The Millhollands discovered that George was tal- 
ented not only in singing, but in painting as well. They 
encouraged him to study music and art seriously, and 
to save his money with a view of going to college. In 
a year he had saved enough to enter Simpson College 
at Indianola, Iowa, where, in addition to the regular 
work, he registered for courses in art and music. 

By the time Carver had paid all his entrance fees 
at Simpson, he had exactly ten cents left to live on. 
He bought five cents’ worth of corn-meal, and five 
cents’ worth of beef suet, and on these he lived for one 
entire week. By the end of that time, he had managed 
to advertise his willingness to do laundry work, and 
thereafter he never lacked for employment. 

His course in art did not last very long. After the 
third lesson, the instructor asked him not to come to 
classes, saying that he was a natural artist and that 
the rest of the lessons would not teach him anything 


A STUDENT OF TWO BOOKS 7 


he did not already know. Though he did not study 
again under a formal instructor, painting was always 
his favorite recreation, and his first painting, exhibited 
at the World’s Fair in Chicago, was valued at four 
thousand dollars. 

Three years at Simpson College quickened his old 
desires to know all about the wonders of nature. By 
this time there had entered into his curiosity the con- 
viction of a plan and purpose in the whole creation. 

“My watchword was, ‘I want to know.’ I wanted 
to know how a plant grows, where the blossom gets its 
color, why God makes each thing, and why I can’t 
make things as well as God makes them. What 
is my relation to the plants and their relation to me? 
What is the relation of the plants and myself to the 
great God who made all of us?” 

So he decided to take a course in agricultural chem- 
istry, and for that purpose went to Iowa State College 
at Ames, Iowa. 

Again he supported himself at first by laundry work;' 
but after he had taken his bachelor’s degree, he was 
put in charge of the greenhouses of the institution and 
given direction of the work in systematic botany. It 
was here that he learned the answers to many of the 
questions that had been puzzling him, and began to 
catch glimpses of still greater wonders to be revealed. 
At length he received his master’s degree in science. ‘I 
was not weaned away from art and music,” he says, 
“but science seemed to be more useful and practical.” 

At this time, that great industrial school for the 


8 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


Negro, Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama, was in the 
early stages of its growth. The great buildings on the 
present campus were, in those days, scarcely dreamed 
of; but even then large numbers of wide-awake, eager 
young people were filling its temporary sheds—one of 
them a remodeled hen-house. New possibilities for 
their race were opening before them. 

The head of this institution, Booker T. Washington, 
had an almost prophetic foresight of what might be 
done for his people, not by taking them out of the 
surroundings in which they lived, but by teaching them 
to use the minds and the hands God had given them, 
and to discover the gifts He had hidden for them in the 
soil they lived on. To develop this work he needed a 
man trained in just those branches which George 
Carver had been studying at Iowa State College. In 
some way Mr. Washington was directed to write to 
the college and ask if they could recommend a teacher — 
of science for Tuskegee. The faculty replied that they © 
had the very man for him. And so it happened that, 
in the year 1894, George Carver journeyed southward 
to Alabama, to take up his life work at Tuskegee 
Institute. 

Science was a new subject at Tuskegee. When the 
young teacher arrived, he found no equipment for ex- — 
periments of any kind. Nor had the school any money 
to buy apparatus for him; but the motto of Tuskegee 
was then, as it is now, “Use what you have.” 

So the new professor sent his students out through 
the village of Tuskegee to visit the alleys and rubbish 


A STUDENT OF TWO BOOKS 9 


piles, and to bring him whatever they could find in the 
way of broken china, empty bottles, and bits of rubber 
and wire. Out of these fragments he made apparatus 
for his laboratory, and began work. 

As he went about his task of collecting and studying 
the plants that grew around Tuskegee, Carver was 
accustomed to carry a long, slender botany case, about 
a yard in length, in which to place his specimens. 
Nothing like it had ever been seen in that neighbor- 
hood, and it aroused great curiosity among the Negroes. 

“YT knows what he is!” declared more than one old 
“mammy,” with a look of wisdom. ‘“Needn’t nobody 
tell me nothin’ about dat man! He’s a root-doctor 
(conjurer), dat’s what he is!” And many of the 
Negroes came to him to ask him for “spells” or 
“charms” out of the long case he carried, to ease ‘“‘de 
misery” in their. backs, cure their sick cows, or keep 
away thunder-storms. 

One of the great objects of the school at Tuskegee 
is, not to educate young men and women in such a way 
that they will leave the ignorance and poverty of their 
home surroundings to seek for success in business or 
professional life; but rather to show them that it is 
not necessary for their homes to be meager and 
wretched, when those homes can be so greatly improved 
simply by knowing how to use the things about them. 
Tuskegee aims to make its students eager to return to 
their homes, and able to transform them because of 
what they have learned in school. 

As time went on, Carver’s discoveries in the labora- 


10 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


tory grew to be of such importance that it was decided 
to let him stop conducting classes and give his whole 
time to research and experiment. 

It was discovered that there were two ways of get- 
ting at the problem of making a new life for the south- 
ern Negro. One was to find out what kind of crops 
the soil would support and to introduce new plants. 
This Dr. Carver has done with the eight-feet-high tropi- 
cal grass from Africa which he has successfully grown 
at Tuskegee, and which, by successive cuttings, yields 
four crops of fodder in a year. 

The other, and still more practical way, was to study | 
the possibilities of the things that already grew in 
abundance—the natural products of the land. This 
has been Dr. Carver’s greatest work, and its results 
are truly like magic. 

Starting with the commonest of crops, he began to 
study the products which could be obtained from the 
peanut and the sweet potato. These are plants which 
are easy to raise. They produce in great abundance 
even in poor soil, and do not take away as much fer- 
tility from the ground as do many other crops; in fact 
the peanut actually enriches the soil it grows in. In- 
deed, the value of the experiments in agriculture at 
Tuskegee is greatly increased by the fact that the 
twenty-three hundred acres of land belonging to the 
Institute are naturally poor soil, so that anything that 
can be raised at the Institute is capable of being grown 
on the poorest land in the neighborhood. 

From the sweet potato Dr. Carver has succeeded in 









és i ay 


% - = # Bi. 1f eS . 


GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER 


The motto of Tuskegee Institute is “Use what you have.” Mr. 
Carver had peanuts and potatoes and brains. Out of them he 
made nearly three hundred useful products. 





A STUDENT OF TWO BOOKS Ir 


‘making four varieties of flour, five kinds of library 
paste, three kinds of breakfast foods, two kinds of 
coffee, fourteen varieties of candy, forty-five dyes, 
ranging from jet black to a rich orange; as well as 
starch, vinegar, ink, shoe blacking, molasses, fillers for 
wood, and substances closely resembling cocoanut, 
chocolate, tapioca, and preserved ginger, and a rubber 
compound which may prove to be his most valuable 
invention. Thus, from sweet potatoes alone, over a 
hundred products have been derived in his laboratory, 
each and all of which can be readily manufactured for 
practical use. | 

Still more remarkable are the one hundred and sixty- 
five products which Dr. Carver has developed from the 
peanut. These range from flour to axle grease, and 
from a drug resembling quinine to a fine quality of 
linoleum. They also include pomade, wood stains of 
nine different colors, nineteen dyes, Worcestershire 
sauce, soap, and nitroglycerine. Sprouted peanuts are 
much like very tender asparagus, and peanut germs are 
an ideal food for pigeons and young chicks. Peanut. 
milk can hardly be told from cows’ milk, and keeps 
just about as well; it makes a smooth and delicious. 
ice-cream. 

In fact, Dr. Carver declares that “if all the other 
kinds of vegetable foodstuffs in the world were de- 
stroyed, a well-balanced ration could be made for both 
man and beast from peanuts and sweet potatoes.” 

These are only two of the many members of the 
vegetable kingdom with which he has had great success. 


12 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


From the pecan nut he has made over sixty different 
catticles, and the list is still increasing. He is working 
now on okra, from the fiber of which he has already 
made paper, rope, matting, and carpeting. Potash 
and stock feed have been produced from the china- 
berry; ribbons from the poplar bark; baskets from the 
wistaria vine; and many varieties of blues, including 
water-soluble laundry blue made from red clay. Dyes 
made from dandelion, black oak, wood ashes, sweet 
gum, willow, swamp maple, muscadine grapes, onions, 
velvet beans, and tomato vines are among his discoy- 
eries. A business organization known as the “‘Carver 
Products Company” has recently been formed to manu- 
facture and market these articles. | 

More and more Dr. Carver has come to feel that 
nothing God has made is without its use. In the soil 
He has locked up all we need to support and beautify 
life; the key is for the man who seeks for it. Look- — 
ing at the hills around, unsuited for farming, this ear- 
nest believer in Providence felt that they could not 
have been made in vain. There came to his mind the 
words, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from 
whence cometh my help’; and encouraged by them, he 
went forth to find what hills are good for. 

As a result, some of his most interesting experi- 
ments have been those he has made with the various 
kinds of sand and clay to be found about Tuskegee, 
which have furnished nearly every color for dyes and 
paints. In these his artistic soul takes delight, and 
he has used them in creating many pictures. He uses 


A STUDENT OF TWO BOOKS 13 


no brush, but applies all the colors with his thumb. 
Some of these pictures, made with clay, look like water- 
colors; others are ‘“‘sand pictures,’ made by covering 
a smooth board with shellac and applying the different 
sands before it dries. He has many specimens of 
these pictures, including landscapes, fruit, and flower 
pieces. 

But these discoveries are not worked out merely for 
his own pleasure. Dr. Carver considers every one of 
them.as a direct gift of God through him to his people,. 
and feels that nothing matters quite so much just now 
as how to make them known and how to get them used 
by the people of the South. 

About fifteen years ago, a “health car” passed 
through Tuskegee, demonstrating the different ways 
of preventing and curing disease. Booker Washington 
and Dr. Carver were standing together watching it, 
and Mr. Washington said: 

“We ought to have a car like that going round the 
country.” . 

‘“‘We need more than that!” said Carver. ‘We need 
an exhibit of all the things that help people to live 
better—foodstuffs and useful articles of all kinds.” 

From this suggestion came the beginning of a series 
of efforts to get the results of the Tuskegee discoveries 
and experiments into use among the people of the 
South. 

The latest method of doing this is known as the 
“Movable School.” This is a truck that goes out 
from Tuskegee, carrying both men and women from 


14 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


the Institute, with various models and exhibits. It 
stops at the home of some Negro who has previously 
given permission to have his place used for demon- 
stration purposes—usually the poorest place in the 
neighborhood. The Negroes gather from all directions 
to see the transformation. ; 

The young men, aided by the owner, set to work on 
the outside of the property. They show him how to 
make new fences, to replace the broken ones, making 
posts of the flint and sand to be found right there on 
the place, molded into a sort of concrete. They help 
him make a new roof, show him how to improve his _ 
garden and field by fertilizing and better planting and > 
cultivation; mend his outbuildings, and finally give 
the entire house, inside and out, and the various sheds, 
a coat of kalsomine colored with the clays discovered 
by Dr. Carver, who has arranged cards’ with color 
schemes for making the appearance of such a place 
beautiful and harmonious. 

Meantime the young women help the wife to put 
everything in spotless order within the house. They 
teach her new recipes, using in different ways the food- 
stuffs raised on the place; they give her lessons in sew- 
ing and mending and the care of children; and they 
teach her to make various useful household articles, 
using as far as possible only materials which are right 
at hand. 

Indeed, this is the motto of the whole Tuskegee — 
work, given by Booker Washington to his students and 
faculty, and made by Dr. Carver the watchword of 


A STUDENT OF TWO BOOKS 15 


his life: “Let down your buckets where you are!” 
“And my bucket,” says Dr. Carver, “has always come 
up brimful and running over.” It is his firm belief 
that, wherever God has placed a man, there He has 
put everything that man needs to live by, if the man 
will only search for it. One of his favorite verses is 
the one in the first chapter of Genesis, in which God 
speaks to man of every herb and tree He has created, 
saying, “To you it shall be for meat.” Another of 
his mottoes, constantly repeated, in the light of which 
he has achieved all of his most wonderful discoveries, 
is, “I can do all things through Christ which strengthen- 
eth me.” 

To such a man come great honors and opportuni- 
ties, though he never seeks them. A few years ago, 
Mr. Edison sent a special representative to Tuskegee, 
to offer Dr. Carver a large salary to come and work 
with him for five years in his laboratory at Orange, 
New Jersey. Dr. Carver considered the offer a great 
honor, but firmly though humbly declined it. 

“T felt,” he said, ‘that God was not through with 
me yet at Tuskegee; there is still plenty of work to do 
for Him here.” 

When Congress was considering the advisability of 
placing a tariff on peanuts, Dr. Carver was called 
before the Ways and Means Committee of the House 
for consultation. The Committee had allotted him 
five minutes for a hearing, and he kept carefully within 
the limit; but when he stopped, they urged him to go 
on and he talked for more than an hour. He is now 


16 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


frequently called to Washington as an si eciny in agri- 
cultural chemistry. 

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in Lae 
don, though he does not know who proposed him for 
membership, and declares himself unworthy of the 
honor. He received, also, the Spingarn Medal for 
1922, presented to “that man or woman of African 
descent and American citizenship who shall have made 
the highest achievement during the preceding year or 
years in any honorable field of human endeavor.” 
This is the highest honor that can come to eel member 
of the Negro race. 

The impression which Dr. Carver’s work, as ex- 
plained by himself, makes on those who hear him on 
the many occasions when he is invited to all parts of 
the South to tell of his discoveries and their uses, is 
shown by an incident which occurred at Suffolk, Vir- 
ginia. After his address, a white woman came pushing 
her way through the crowd, and asked to be introduced 
to him. Looking earnestly in his face, she exclaimed 
‘abruptly: 

“You didn’t do that work!” 

“No,” he said, catching her meaning in spite of her 
bluntness, “‘no, it isn’t my work; it is God’s work!” 

“Yes, it is His work,” said the woman, “and He gave 
it to you to do for Him. You could never have done 
it alone!” 

At one time Dr. Carver was invited by William 
Holtzclaw, a Tuskegee graduate, who is the head of 
an institute at Utica, Mississippi, to make an address 


A STUDENT OF TWO BOOKS 17 


before the school. Before his arrival, a white man 
came to the principal and said: 

“Look here; I want to ask one question of you. Is 
this man who is coming a real black man, or is he 
partly white? So many of your leaders have a good 
bit of white blood, and of course we know that’s what 
makes them brilliant. Now, is this a real Negro, or 
not?” : 

“This,” said Holtzclaw, “is a real black man; but 
come and see him for yourself.” 

After hearing Dr. Carver’s address, the white man 
sought the principal again. 

“Say,” he demanded, “what is that man, anyhow? 
Is he educated, or is he a freak?” 

Dr. Carver’s only comment, when told about it, was: 
“Well, you can’t wonder that they feel that way about 
us. But as a matter of fact, what I am doing is not 
just the result of education. [ am not merely edu- 
cated; I am /ed, in the doing of this work.” 

His love for all living things makes everything in 
nature dear to him. He is never seen without some 
kind of flower or leaf in his buttonhole. Not long ago 
he was asked to prepare a book on botany, and an- 
other on chemistry. The botany he is now engaged 
upon; but when asked whether he would also write 
the chemistry, he shook his head. 

“TY do not care so much for chemistry,” he said. 
“That is about dead things—metals and acids and salts. 
It is the living things I love—the plants that grow, 
that God has given life as He gave it to you and me!” 


18 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


Dearest of all to him are the hours he spends with 
his Bible classes. ‘These are held every Sunday eve- 
ning during the half-hour between supper and evening 
prayers. 

About fourteen years ago, the young man who acted 
as janitor of the agricultural building asked permission 
of Dr. Carver to use one of the rooms. It was granted, 
and the next Sunday, seeing a light in his own office, 
Dr. Carver was curious enough to look in and see what 
was going on. He found the janitor and two other stu- 
dents so deeply absorbed in their Bibles that they did 
not see or hear him at the door. The following day they - 
came and told him that they had started a Bible class 
and that they had elected him teacher! He protested 
that he could not teach them anything like that, but 
they insisted. So he began with the first chapter of 
Genesis, and brought specimens from his laboratory to 
show how science agrees with the Bible about the order 
in which the plants and animals were created. 

From this small beginning there has grown a class 
of more than two hundred pupils to whom he explains 
the two books of God—the book of nature and the — 
written word. Between these two, he declares, there is 
no disagreement; such variance as there appears to be 
is due to our ignorance, and the more we know of 
science, the more we see that it is one with the teaching 
of God’s word. 

He illustrates everything as he goes, from the facts 
with which his work has made him familiar. The 
plague of locusts is just like one he saw while living 


A STUDENT OF TWO BOOKS 19 


in Kansas, when the daylight was darkened by the 
hosts of flying insects. The spies knew that the Prom- 
ised Land was “flowing with milk and honey,” because 
they saw everywhere the long grass, and God never 
makes a country like that without putting cattle in it; 
and they gathered the grapes of Eshcol, which proved 
there were bees; for without the bee, which carries 
pollen to fertilize the grape blossoms, the vine could 
not produce such marvelous bunches of fruit. Thus 
every step of the study is illumined by the facts of 
nature, which he believes are the truth of God as really 
as the words of prophets and apostles. 

To him there is nothing that is not a part of his re- 
ligion, and he passes without a sense of change from 
the church to the laboratory. A Sunday-night caller 
once found him in his room, his hands stained from a 
recent experiment. 

“We were talking before Auch about the okra,’’ he 
said simply, “‘and it suggested to me something new; 
so I just came over here to find out another of the arte 
God has put into the okra plant for our use.” 

For his own race he has a deep love and a great 
hope. 

“T look upon the Negro race,” he says, “as a baby 
race—still in its infancy, not yet grown up like the 
‘white race. But you know,” he adds with the smile 
that so often brightens his dark features, “it is written, 
‘Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings Thou hast 
perfected praise.’ ”’ 


IT 
A MODERN COLUMBUS 


| the little city of Molfetta, a quaint old town of 

Southern Italy, there was great rejoicing one day 
over the birth of a baby. The joy was the greater 
because the baby was a boy, who could carry on the 
name of his grandfather, Don Costantino, the family 
hero. When Italy was much oppressed by the 
Bourbon rulers, in the middle of the last century, Don 
Costantino had been the leader of a group of patriots 
who organized to resist that tyranny. Spies informed 
on them, and they were hastened to prison without 
trial. Don Costantino, as their leader, was compelled 
to drink a cup of poison, while his followers were re- 
leased on promise to conspire no more. 

Don Costantino left a widow and six children, 
among whom his memory was held as that of a saint 
and hero. That was why, when the little grandson 
was born, the child was christened Costantino, or 
Constantine Panunzio. From his birth, his grand- 
mother had charge of his bringing-up, and she never 
ceased to tell him that he was to be a great man, like 
his grandfather. She had his future fully planned; 
he was to be “first a priest, then a teacher, and at last 
a patriotic statesman.” 

In these plans she was seconded by her son, Con; 


stantine’s father, to whom she had contrived to give a 
20 


A MODERN COLUMBUS 2r 


university education. He had become a lawyer of 
many and varied interests. At one time he estab- 
lished and conducted a private school for boys; he 
was also a writer and a speaker of some note, espe- 
cially on the subject of clean politics, in which he was 
deeply interested. 

At times Constantine’s father was a stern ruler in 
his household, and in after life the boy remembered 
many severe punishments, most of them for truancy 
from school. At other times, his father was a delight- 
ful companion, taking the boy on walks and fishing 
trips. He almost overwhelmed him with tenderness 
when Constantine lost the sight of one eye while play- 
ing with fireworks, as the boys did at Christmas time, 
for in Italy fireworks were a part of the Christmas 
celebration. 

Not every Christmas was as sad as that one; in- 
deed, to the Panunzio children it was the happiest 
festival of the year. Although the Italian children 
had no Christmas trees or exchange of gifts (in Italy, 
St. Nicholas’ Day, January fifth, was the time to hang 
up stockings, or rather, boots), on Christmas Day 
everybody feasted on the best fruits of the year, care- 
fully saved for that occasion; and the carol-singing 
sounded like the voices of angels on the quiet air of 
night. 

The Panunzio children—four girls and four boys— 
had a pretty household custom at Christmas. For 
days beforehand they would hunt for the prettiest 
letter-paper they could find, with decorations or mot- 


22 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


toes printed on it. Then each one would try to com- 
pose the best letter or little poem to: express his love 
for his father and mother. These were hidden about 
the parents’ plates, and “the best part of the Christ- 
mas dinner was to hear Father and Mother read the 
letters we had written, and then pronounce. which one 
was the best.” | | 
The Christmas Midnight Mass in the Cathedral was 
a wonderful service, with blazing candles and glorious 
music. But better yet the children loved the home 
ceremony of the Presepio—the Manger. They would 
work for days before Christmas to make a miniature 
Bethlehem, bringing home sod and planting little 
twigs in it for trees, making tiny houses and winding 
roads. Then amid this scenery they would place little 
terra-cotta figures kept carefully from year to year— 
the wise men with their camels, the shepherds and 
their flocks, and a tiny stable with Mary and Joseph, 
and the Babe lying in a manger. Their father would 
gather them all about it on Christmas Eve, by soft 
candlelight, and tell them the whole story of the holy ~ 
birth—the star, and the angels, and the gifts of gold. 
He was a wonderful father in many ways, beloved 
in spite of his occasional sternness; yet he made one 
great mistake with his eldest son, for he was deter- 
mined that the boy should follow in his own steps and 
in those of his grandfather, and persisted in trying to 
train him for a profession. He lost sight, you see, of 
the fact that Constantine had had another grandfather, 
from whom he inherited more than he did from Don 


A MODERN COLUMBUS 23 


Costantino. This was his mother’s father, who had 
been a sea-captain, and had lost his life in a ship- 
wreck, 

From his very earliest days, Constantine seemed to 
hear the call of the sea. Even his kindergarten books 
were covered with crude drawings of ships. At every 
opportunity he would run off to the harbor to watch 
the vessels go by or to board those that lay at anchor. 
His toys were always ships. He spent every bit of 
money he could get for little vessels, which he fitted 
out with complete rigging. “My dreams at night,” he 
says, “were almost invariably of ships, of oceans, and 
far countries.” 

‘Because of this love of the water, which often led 
_ him to play truant from school in spite of the severe 
punishments he knew he would suffer both from his 
father and his teacher, Constantine acquired the repu- 
tation of being a very bad boy. It was not really 
that he meant to do wrong; but when he saw the 
water or a ship, he forgot everything else. The first 
time he heard a siren whistle, on an English coal 
freighter, he simply ran to the harbor and stayed there 
all day waiting to hear it again, forgetting entirely 
that there was such a thing as school. He and his 
“gang,” made up of other boys who loved the sea, 
were always getting into scrapes, sometimes dangerous 
ones, until all his relatives, except his mother and 
grandmother, had decided that the boy who was to 
have followed his honored grandfather was good for 
nothing. 


24 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


He confirmed this idea by being a rebel against 
church as well as school. He had never been much 
interested in religion as it was taught by the priest, 
and was much better pleased with a book of Bible 
stories he happened to find one day. How such a 
book ever got into his home, he never could tell, but 
he took care to read it in secret, well knowing that 
his people would call it a bad book and punish him 
for reading it. “Even so,’ he said afterwards, “to 
me that reading was most sweet,” particularly the 
Resurrection story which he thought most wonderful 
of all. | 
When he was taken to his first confession, the priest 
led him into a dark room and told him to kneel, and 
there came on him a sense of bewilderment and of 
being imprisoned. A streak of light fell from the 
partly closed door, and in a fiash he had leaped to his 
feet, rushed out of the door, and gone to play by his _ 
beloved sea. Nor did he ever afterward go to con- 
fession. : 

His father, thinking to shame him into going back 
to school, mistakenly tried to crush the desire for the | 
sea out of the boy, first by putting him to work at 
various occupations—in a foundry, a soap factory, a 
blacksmith’s shop, and a cobbler’s place, and then in 
the electric plant. The boy liked these new experi- 
ences and enjoyed earning the money—which he 
spent, as usual, on toy ships. The only result was 
that while working in the soap factory, he learned 
that the soap he was making was to be sent to 


A MODERN COLUMBUS 25 


America, and he straightway resolved that he would 
go to America himself some day. 

Then his father, finding the apprenticeship method 
a failure, sent Constantine back to school, going with 
him every day to make sure he attended. Finally the 
boy passed all the grades and was ready to go to a 
higher school. His grandmother, still clinging to her 
intention, insisted that he should be sent to the Semi- 
nary where boys were trained for the priesthood. 

This place was like a dungeon to him, with its dark 
rooms and long corridors and the iron fence twelve 
feet high all around the grounds, which the pupils 
were not allowed to pass. The teachers he hated, 
especially the professor of mathematics. Once when 
Constantine had not prepared his lesson, this teacher 
flew into a fit of anger and struck him so hard with 
a ruler that he cut the boy’s head open. With blood 
streaming down his face, Constantine ran to the gate 
and fought with the gateman till he won his way out. 
His father was very angry with the teacher, and now 
at last began to see that he could not force the boy 
to become a student. He did not again send him to 
school. And so, at the age of thirteen, having convinced 
everybody that he was not meant for a scholar, cer- 
tainly not for a priest, Constantine was allowed to ship 
on a coasting schooner as a sailor boy. 

His parting with his people made them all forget 
their disappointment in him and show the real affec- 
tion of their hearts. All his uncles and aunts and 
cousins brought him gifts—a sea-chest, a sailor’s bag, 


26 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


blankets, pillows and slips, clothing, towels and hand- 
kerchiefs, and all kinds of eatables. The whole 
family came to see him off, as his vessel, the Angelo, 
spread her sails to the April breeze. 

For a year and a half Constantine voyaged back 
and forth along the Adriatic. Then he began to long 
for a wider world. Home was no longer a place to 
return to, for his grandmother had died of old age, 
his mother and father had died in a scarlet fever epi- 
demic which had swept Molfetta, his sisters were mar- 
ried, and the three younger boys had been taken in 
charge by relatives. Constantine’s Uncle Carlo, who 
was his legal guardian, now gave him permission to 
embark on longer voyages, and he visited many ports 
of Europe, from Constantinople to the British Isles. 

Still the call of the wide world grew louder, and at 
last he shipped on a brig bound for America, Aus- 
tralia, and the South Sea Islands. | 

His ideas of America were very vague. He did not — 
even know that North and South America were dif- 
ferent continents. Much that he had heard of 
America was from sailors who had touched South 
American ports, and to his mind the name brought a 
vision of “vast stretches of virgin lands and great, 
winding rivers,” of a leisurely life among easy-going © 
people, in a mild climate. How different he found it, 
when he landed amid the crowded streets of Boston, to 
pass his first winter in the rigors of New England! 

It was not cold at first, for the ship entered Boston 
Harbor in July. While it lay there, Constantine de- 





CONSTANTINE PANUNZIO 


The boy Constantine was forever running away to the seaside. 
The picture shows the man Panunzio (in the center) again run- 
ning away to sea, this time to study scientifically the conditions 
under which steerage passengers live while on shipboard. 





A MODERN COLUMBUS 27 


cided to make an effort to leave the vessel, whose cap- 
tain was an unjust and brutal man, and return home 
some other way. He tried at first to get the captain 
to release him, but got only kicks; so one evening 
early in September he left the vessel with his sea- 
chest and sailor bag, and fifty cents in his pocket, to 
seek a job which would pay his passage home on 
another vessel. : 

For five days he lived on one loaf of bread a day, 
and slept on a recreation pier. On the fifth day he 
met on the pier a French sailor named Louis. They 
struck up a friendship, though they had to converse 
chiefly by signs; and they went about together inquir- 
ing for work. 

At an Italian boarding-house they were given to 
understand that there was plenty of work to be had 
at “peek and shuvle’”—the first English words that 
Constantine learned. He imagined they meant some 
kind of office work. When he was led to an excava- 
tion where men were digging, and saw what “pick and 
shovel” really were, his heart sank. A “padrone,” or 
labor contractor, made them what they thought a 
splendid offer of work twelve miles out of Boston, 
with a “shantee” where they could sleep, a ‘‘storo” 
where they could buy “grosserie” very cheap, and one 
dollar and twenty-five cents a day, out of which they 
would pay the “padrone”’ only fifty cents a week for 
having got them this “gooda jobba.” 

After three days on the “gooda jobba,” they found 
that between paying the “padrone,”’ buying groceries 


28 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


at the prices charged at the company “storo,’” and 
paying for the privilege of sleeping in the straw bunks 
of the ‘“‘shantee,” they would have nothing left of 
their wages. Not having received a cent of pay, they 
decided to quit. 

They next tried a small manufacturing village, 
where they applied for work in a woolen mill. The 
rest of the workmen were Russians, who quickly 
showed their dislike for the “dagoes”—a word which 
Constantine now heard for the first time—and made 
it so unpleasant for them that the boss, fearing a riot, 
had to ask them to leave. This was the young man’s 
first realization of what race prejudice means, and it 
hurt him deeply. “It is an ever-present evil spirit,” 
he writes, “felt, though unseen, wounding hearts, cut- 
ting souls. It passes on its poison like a serpent from 
generation to generation.” To the breaking down of 
this evil he was one day to dedicate his life. 

The two friends next took an offer to go to the 
Maine woods at thirty dollars a month, with room and 
board, to open the way for a new lumber camp. Con- 
stantine was no success at this sort of work. “TI 
seemed to have the knack of hitting the tree once 
and once only in the same place. No one dared work 
within a radius of twenty yards of me for fear of 
losing his life.”’ The boss, a patient Scandinavian, set 
him at dragging logs and finally at fetching water. 
Once, while hunting a new brook for a larger water 
supply, he heard a noise and thought he saw a wild 
animal. Up a tree he went, and stayed there till 


A MODERN COLUMBUS 29 


night; the men only discovered his whereabouts when 
they found the bucket at the foot of the tree. 

When he and Louis tried to leave the camp, having 
decided by the ninth day that it was not their kind 
of work, they found. that the captain of the little 
steamer on which they had reached the place flatly 
refused to take them across the lake. They realized 
that their job held them virtually prisoners. But 
sailors were not going to be held back by a little water. 
They made a raft of some logs, tying them with ropes 
and chains they found on the shore; filled two whisky 
bottles with molasses—the only provisions they could 
get—and started off to pole across the lake. A Rus- 
sian who also wanted to leave hailed them as they 
were pushing off, and begged by gestures to be taken 
on board; so the three set out on their voyage—‘“‘a 
twentieth-century Tower of Babel on a raft on an 
American lake.” That night they slept in the woods, 
or the other two did; Constantine spent the night 
keeping up a fire to drive away wild animals! 

The Russian left them in the morning, and the 
others pushed along shore on their raft. When their 
molasses was, about exhausted, they found a rival 
lumber camp, whose boss took pity on them and got 
the captain of the steamer to take them to a landing- 
place. The captain kept all Constantine’s worldly 
goods till he could come back and pay for his voyage, 
which was not until months afterward. 

They wandered from one lumber camp to another, 
as there was no other work to be had. The Italian 


30 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


boy suffered severely from the cold of the Maine 
winter, and once was nearly drowned crossing a stream. 
on thin ice. When they reached a French-Canadian 
camp, Louis found himself more at home; but Con- 
stantine, never much of a lumberman, was soon dis- 
charged. He left his Sunday trousers with Louis, who 
had borrowed them and declined to give them up. 

In Stacyville, a small hamlet, Constantine went to 
work for a farmer, whom he believed to be the first 
“real American” he had met. Had his only impres- 
sions of America been what he gained in this village, — 
he would have a poor opinion of it. In all his life, even 
among sailors, he never heard such a ae ey and © 
filthy speech as in Stacyville. 

There was not a church in the village, though a 
minister from ariother town occasionally preached 
there. Women as well as men smoked pipes, and 
“liquor flowed freely, though it was in prohibition - 
Maine.” 

Constantine’s boss found his name too long for con- 
venience. At first, for some unknown reason, he called 
him ‘‘Mr. Beefsteak”; on protest, he consented to 
change his name to Frank Nardi, by which he was 
known for several years. One thing Stacyville did 
for him: there was nobody in the community who 
could speak to him except in English, so he learned the 
language very fast, if not very correctly. 

By spring he had earned enough money to go home 
to Italy, though it had not been paid to him. He» 
asked his boss for it, but was put off. Finally the 


A MODERN COLUMBUS 31 


man laughed at him and handed him five dollars, in- 
stead of the eighty-five dollars due him, saying he 
could give him no more. 

Constantine was bitterly angry, and determined to 
go to Boston and get a lawyer to help him collect 
his wages. He had not money enough to get there, 
but a friend advised him to steal a ride on a train, 
and he attempted to do so. He was caught and put off 
at a station in Vermont, where a big man told him to 
go with him for the night. The place proved to be 
the lock-up. Here the boy suffered agonies of humilia- 
tion and fear, aided. by some Italian scribbles on the 
wall to the effect that no one who ever entered that 
cell would leave it alive. In the morning, children 
threw stones at him behind the bars, and the black- 
smith across the street came and spat in his face. 

But the good old judge before whom he appeared 
listened kindly to his story, and did nothing more than 
to buy him a ticket back to Stacyville. Soon after 
he returned, his employer left the town; and his suc- 
cessor on the farm paid Constantine’s wages regularly. 
But this man nearly got him into much more serious 
trouble by making him help smuggle in liquor from 
Massachusetts, and setting him to sell it in the woods 
near a fair-ground. He narrowly escaped arrest by 
the sheriff, and was furious with his boss when he 
found what an illegal act it was into which he had 
been entrapped. 

Constantine had now grown hopeless of returning to 
Italy. Yet he felt there must be something better 


32 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


than this in America, if he could only find it. At 
this time of discouragement, his good angel was a 
kind woman, the mother of his employer’s wife, who 
arranged for him to go to her son’s home in the town 
of Sherman till he could find work. 

Just before he left Stacyville, he was unwillingly 
attending a revival meeting of which he understood 
very little, when there came to him a sense of a new 
power that could make life better. What caused it 
he could not tell; but he says, “For the first time I 
thought of life in terms of service.” 

At Sherman he truly did find “real Americans.” 
His employer, a farmer by the name of Richmond, 
was a New England Yankee of the ‘‘Uncle Sam” type. 
Except for a tendency to use strong language when 
angry, this man was a consistent and earnest Chris- 
tian, and his wife a woman of “deep spiritual loveli- 
ness.” Their five daughters were all kind and con- 
siderate in their treatment of the- young man. ‘The 
religion of this home was a matter of every-day life, 
and the grace before meals, family worship, and sing- 
ing of hymns on Sunday afternoons, beside the ser- 
vices he attended with them at church and Sunday 
school, gave him a new ideal of Christian living, 
though the Puritan teaching of the minister was some- 
times hard for his warm Italian nature to accept. 

At Christmas the family gave him a little New Tes- 
tament, and he sat up late at night reading it. He 
liked especially the book of Romans, because it was 
written to people in his native land. The twelfth 


A MODERN COLUMBUS 33 


chapter was the first piece of religious teaching that 
he really understood and took to himself; and he 
memorized it word for word. 

This made him eager to learn better English and 
many other things. The oldest daughter of the Rich- 
monds was a school-teacher, and he persuaded her to 
let him attend her school. But the children made fun 
of this big fellow of twenty who did not know as 
much as. they; they called him names and threw 
paper wads at him, till Miss Richmond decided to 
teach him at home. 

Late that winter he went to the home of the But- 
terfields, relatives of the Richmonds in Maine, to help 
with some lumbering there. Mr. Butterfield one day 
said to him suddenly, “Frank, my boy, you ought to 
go to school.” It was like a challenge to his waken- 
ing mind. Soon after, he read of a poor Italian boy 
who had worked his way through school and had be- 
come a minister. He tried to get help from the vil- 
lage pastor to reach that school, but found little sym- 
pathy. Then he wrote to the Italian himself, and 
got the name of the school, but not much encourage- 
ment to go. 

While he was waiting for his letter to come, he hung 
around the post-office so much that he aroused the 
interest of a policeman who asked him his name, na- 
tionality and business, and why he loitered about the 
office so much. Constantine explained about the 
letter, and the policeman seemed so approachable 
that after the letter came, and its contents proved so 


34 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


disappointing, he went to the policeman and told him 
about it. The officer drew the whole story from him, 
took him to the police station (rousing in Constan- 
tine’s mind some fears of being arrested again), and 
wrote him a letter to the president of the school, 
which he then mailed for him. 

There proved later to have been a mistake in the 
address. When an answer did not come, the police- 
man advised Constantine to go in person. He took 
him to the station, lent him his mileage, with an ad- 
dressed envelope in which to return it, put him on the 
right train, told the conductor his story, asked him 
to sec that the young man got off at the right station, | 
and waved him good-by as the train pulled out. And 
so Constantine came to the Maine Wesleyan Semi- 
nary, with very little money but with one deter- 
mination. 

At first he was not popular with the soap who 
took his aluminum pocket-comb to be a stiletto; and 
later, though he had been among them three years, 
they resented it when he was chosen to act ‘‘Shylock” 
in the senior play. Resolved to prove that he could 
do his part, he worked till he had memorized the 
entire play, and could act as prompter to them all. 
Such zeal could not help but put them in a better 
humor, and he was warmly praised for his rendering | 
of his part. This was his first real success, and it 
heartened him greatly. Another came soon after, 
when he took the prize for his school in a state ora- 
torical contest for preparatory schools by declaiming 


A MODERN COLUMBUS 35 


the court scene from the same play. At last he felt 
that there was real justice in America, and that he 
was not hopelessly handicapped by his foreign birth. 

That fall he entered Wesleyan University in Con- 
necticut where he worked his way through to a degree. 
Then he went to the Boston University School of 
Theology to prepare for the ministry. His teachers 
in college gave him great inspiration and help, and 
he felt that he had gained a new view of life. He 
took pride in the work by which he earned his way 
as janitor, tailor, watchman, and mail clerk, and de- 
clined financial help when it was offered him out of 
sheer joy in being independent. He says: “It put new 
backbone in me. Life became a great adventure.” 
With all this, he felt that he had lost some things in 
America—his simple confidence in people’s motives; 
his respect for law and order, which he often saw 
badly administered; his fine health which, in the rush 
of American life, he almost lost; and much of the 
habit of careful and exact work. Yet he felt that it 
was a wonderful gain to be somebody in himself, and 
not be respected merely for what his grandfather had 
done, as he would have been in Italy. 

Loving his own land, it did not occur to him at first 
to become an American citizen; and when at last he 
did wish to become a citizen, his moves from state to 
state made it hard to get his papers. It was not till 
he had been in America twelve years that he was 
naturalized, and then he was as proud as the old Ro- 
mans must have been of Roman citizenship. He was 


36 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


glad, too, that he had become an American in spirit 
before, instead of after, adopting the name. 

Early in his preparatory course he had felt an im- 
pulse to help the immigrants, especially Italians, who 
did not understand America very well. He tried first 
to serve in an Italian mission during a vacation, but 
found that those in charge cared more about the num- 
bers they could gather than about the real help that 
they could give. After entering college he had the 
experience of teaching an Americanization class super- 
vised by a factory owner. The pupils were interested 
in English, but were openly hostile when he tried to 
teach them citizenship. They told him that it meant. 
nothing to them to be Americans while the very 
American citizen who paid for the teaching of the class 
allowed his foreman to kick them around in his fac- 
tory and call them “‘dagoes.”” When Constantine tried 
to tell this to the manufacturer, the man was furious, 
and spat out, “Let the dagoes go back to their rat- 
holes!” 

Because he was an Italian, Panunzio’s first church, 
which he served for a time as a supply, was divided — 
over accepting him as permanent pastor. He stayed 
two years, however, and won over his opponents. For 
four more years he served American churches. Then 
he thought he saw a chance to help his own people by 
taking a down-town church in Boston, whose congre- 
gation had dwindled greatly with the coming in of 
Italians all around it. He hoped to combine service 
to the small American membership and to the large 


A MODERN COLUMBUS 37 


Italian community about it; but the church officers 
totally refused to have “this well-known church, or 
even a part of it, turned into an Italian church,” so 
that plan failed. 

During this time he speaks with the greatest appre- 
ciation of the helpfulness of a man he calls his 
“American Big Brother.” This man had rather a 
prejudice at first against Italians; but when a certain 
social service institution in Boston, of which he was a 
director, became divided about employing Constantine 
aS superintendent (some of the committee declaring 
he was too Italian, and others that he was too Ameri- 
canized!), the man’s sense of fair play was aroused, 
and he insisted that birth should not be considered, 
but that ability alone should determine the point. 

After that he always stood by Constantine in his 
work; he invited him to his house, took him to con- 
certs and plays, introduced him to his wife and friends, 
and was truly a brother to him. “I am certain,” he 
says, “that had it not been for my American ‘Big 
Brother,’-I would not have the deep-seated faith in 
America which is mine today.” 

His experiences in the crowded tenement section of 
Boston—dirty, treeless, ill-smelling, noisy, full of sa- 
loons and gambling-dens—were often painful and dis- 
couraging. But he came to love the people—first the 
children, singing like larks on the grimy streets and 
fire-escapes when they were not toiling under work 
too heavy for them; then the patient Italian mothers, 
trying to keep the life in their little ones in that sun- 


38 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


less, foul atmosphere; then the fathers, battling often 
beyond their strength to make a mere living for their 
families. . 

It was a great trial to have nothing better to gather 
these people into than an old, dark, dirty building 
that “had been used for every imaginable purpose, 
from a monastery to a storage house.” There were 
three Protestant missions bidding for the attendance 
of the same people, and none of them really helping 
to better their condition. 

Constantine Panunzio labored hard and unselfishly 
to help these people. Once, when he had seen police- 
men roughly drive from Boston Common a number 
of poor people who had come out of the stifiing tene- 
ments on a very hot day for a breath of air and a 
little sleep, he submitted himself shortly after to un- 
just arrest, simply to bring before the attention of 
the court and the public the ill treatment of the im- 
migrant. The result was a wide publicity and the 
correction of a number of abuses. 

When America entered the World War, he tried to 
enlist, but was prevented by his defective sight. The — 
Y.M.C.A. service was open to him, and he was sent 
with their first party to Italy. There he revisited his 
old home, and was urged by his relatives to come back 
to live; but, dear and beautiful as Italy was, he was 
of it no more, and felt that he would never be able 
to make it his home again. 

He had the privilege of raising “the first Stars and 
Stripes which ever flew near the lines of the Italian 


A MODERN COLUMBUS 39 


army.” This was a small silk flag which he carried 
with him, and which he offered for use when it had 
proved impossible to get an American flag for the 
Y.M.C.A. headquarters. Later he carried it on his 
car “to the remotest spots on the firing lines and even 
down into Sicily, in places where it had never been 
seen before.” 

At the opening of a new hut, the patriotic priest 
who was to have made the address was unable to be 
present, and Panunzio was asked to speak to the sol- 
diers on America’s part in the war. He did this so 
clearly and effectively that the men were carried away 
by enthusiasm, and the Italian general kissed him and 
insisted on having his picture taken with him. 

Next day he was called to army headquarters and 
asked to go about, at the expense of the Italian Army, 
from place to place addressing the soldiers. For seven 
months he was engaged in this service, among soldiers 
and civilians, even to the remotest towns of Sicily. He 
gave a wonderful patriotic service to his native land, 
as well as to his adopted country, and did much to 
overcome the suspicion with which Italians at first 
regarded America in the war. 

_ Then sixteen years after his first landing in America, 
he returned to her, this time coming to New York 
Harbor when the city was in the full array and excite- 
ment of the Victory Loan Campaign. “I was again 
in America. I felt like kissing the ground, as Co- 
lumbus had done centuries ago.” He had made his 
“everlasting choice,” and knew that he belonged for- 


40 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


ever to America, to live and die an American citizen. 

Soon after returning, a call for his services came 
from the West. It carried him to the Pacific Coast, 
where he became a professor of the Department of 
Social Science in a Western college. He has since 
resigned this position to devote himself to social re- 
search and writing. He has also given much of his 
time to efforts for the liberation of immigrants un- 
justly imprisoned, and for the better distribution of 
immigrants, who on landing in this country have a 
tendency to settle in the congested parts of our cities. 

His book, The Soul of an Immigrant, from which 
this story is in large part taken, shows us the won- 
derful development of a wayward boy into a strong 
and splendid man, glowing with the love of liberty 
and the passion for service to the new Americans 
whose struggles and disappointments and persistent 
hopes he knows so well. This modern Italian sailor 
has discovered the real America—a greater achieve- 
ment than that of Columbus; and the fruits of that 
discovery, which he seeks to bring to his fellow 
countrymen, are more precious than all the riches of 
the Indies. 


Iil 
THE HAND OF A HELPER 


HERE was trouble and anxiety in the Lin house- 
hold. Living near the city of Canton, the Lins 
were a busy and prosperous family in ordinary times. 
They made a living by cultivating silkworms and rais- 
ing fish for market. But this had been a very bad 
year. The silkworm crop had been a failure; and for 
many days it had rained and rained, so that the fish- 
ponds had overflowed and all the fish had been carried 
away in the flood. Something must be done! 

Now a Chinese family, no matter how large, is very 
closely bound together. Nobody acts for himself; each 
acts for all the others. So a family council was held to 
decide what should be done. Over the seas, they had 
heard, there was a country where there was much work 
to be had at good wages. One of the family, they de- 
cided, must go to America, where he could not only 
support himself, but send home money to help the 
others. Of them all, the one who seemed best fitted to 
go was 2 younger son, named Loo Lin. 

There were, already, relatives in the United States; 
it was not as if there would be no one to help him get 
work when he arrived. But there was no money to 
pay for his passage. He must earn his way across. 
So the boy secured a job as stoker on a vessel bound 
for San Francisco. 

4t 


42 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


When, after the long voyage, he at last reached the 
American harbor, another unforeseen difficulty arose. 
To his consternation, he was forbidden to land. .The 
authorities were going to send him back again to China! 
But the captain of the vessel took an interest in the 
boy, and to him Loo Lin confided the name and ad- 
dress of his cousin in San Francisco. The captain sent 
to the address and found the cousin, who got a lawyer 
to help them. Meanwhile, Loo Lin, terrified, not know- 
ing what to be afraid of and what not to be afraid of, 
was hiding in the smokestack of the vessel, getting very 
black, but determined not to be caught if an inspector — 
came on board. Had he come across the seas expect- 
ing to work in the crew of some big company, he would 
not have been allowed to land, but the lawyer and the 
cousin managed to satisfy the port authorities that Loo 
Lin had not tried to come in as a contract laborer, and 
at last the young man was admitted. 

He found work as a domestic in the household of a 
German family in the city, and spent some years in 
their employ and also in that of other families. 

He was very ambitious to learn English, and went 
faithfully to night school. Often the family for whom 
he worked had dinner so late that he had not time to 
eat any himself, but would hurry through with the 
dishes and rush off to school. After the school was 
dismissed for the night, he and other students would 
go to a Chinese restaurant and get a supper for ten 
cents apiece. : 

It was after he had been in San Francisco some 





LOO LIN 


The scared Chinese boy who landed in San Francisco many 
years ago without money and without work is now a confident 
New York business man, a radiant Christian, active in Church 
and Bible Class, and an inspiriting friend to the hopeless and 
afraid on both sides the Pacific. 





THE HAND OF A HELPER 43 


years that Loo Lin began to hear great things about 
the World’s Fair which was to be held in Chicago. 
Guessing that there would be a great demand for help 
in restaurants and homes, and that he might get larger 
wages than he had been receiving, he decided that it 
would be a gocd time for him to go to that city. 
Through a cousin there he soon found work with an 
American family. | 

Anxious to learn still more English, Loo Lin started 
again to night school. So far it had happened that in 
the United States he had met no one who professed to 
be a Christian. But the night-school he entered in 
Chicago chanced to be a mission school. Here, for 
the first time in America, he met Protestant Christians. 
At home, in China, he had heard of Christianity, but 
only from the members of a Roman Catholic mission. 
Here in Illinois, something about the new religion at- 
tracted him, and he began to attend Sunday school as 
well as night school. 

Soon after he began going to Sunday school, there 
was a lesson about Jesus and Nicodemus. The teacher 
explained very fully and carefully the verse beginning, 
“For God so loved the world...’ This was won- 
derful news to Loo Lin. It went straight to his heart, 
and from that day he decided to be a follower of this 
loving and powerful Savior. 

After becoming a Christian, he was invited to a 
number of Christian homes by the friends he had made 
through the mission, and was very happy in his new 
companionships. But trouble was again on his trail. 


44 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


News came that his older brother in China had died, 
leaving a wife and several children. Now the trouble 
of one member of a Chinese family is the trouble of 
all. The entire family would have been disgraced in 
the eyes of their countrymen if they had failed to pro- 
vide for the widow and her children; and this could 
only be done by the aid of Loo Lin. He was already 
sending home as much as he could possibly spare out 
of his wages, which had never been more than three 
dollars a week. So he left Chicago and went to New 
York, where he hoped to find work that would apey him 
beer. 

Some time during these years, he received a letter 
from home telling him that the family had arranged a 
betrothal for him with the daughter of another family 
of their acquaintance. He had never seen the girl, 
and knew nothing whatever about her; but the word 
of the family was law, and he presently set sail for | 
China to bring back his wife. 

His heart was rather heavy when he remembered 
how lately he had become a Christian, and wondered 
whether the girl he was going to marry would be a 
help or a hindrance to him in this new way of living. 
All the way over on the vessel, he was praying, “Dear 
God, let my wife learn to be a Christian!” 

At the same time, over in a mission school in China, 
there was a young girl whose heart was as troubled as 
_his. She had become a Christian, and now her parents 
were giving her in marriage to a strange young man. 
She did not know whether he would approve her faith 


THE HAND OF A HELPER 45 


or frown upon it. So every day she kept praying, 
“Dear Lord, make my husband a Christian!” 

At length the day came when the betrothed bride 
was to meet for the first time her husband-to-be. Her 
people helped her to dress very carefully for the great 
event, and told her that according to the Chinese 
custom she must hide her face with her fan when she 
first entered the room. 

“Why should I do that?” asked the girl. “I am not 
ashamed to be seen! I am a child of God, and I do 
not need to hide my face from anyone!” 

In spite of her relatives’ protest that the young man 
would not be well impressed with so bold a bride, she 
walked into the room without holding up her fan. 
When he saw her come in, so frank and modest, look- 
ing at him with her clear, honest eyes, Loo Lin’s heart 
gave a great leap, for he knew that only a Christian 
girl would look like that. It was a very happy couple 
who, a few weeks later, sailed for America, content in 
each other’s ideals. 

In New York, Loo Lin’s life ran on smoothly for 
some years. First he was in the employ of others, but 
later he was able to invest for himself in a restaurant. 
He and his wife were very busy, happy people. Sons 
were born to them, to their great pride and joy, and the 
parents worked very hard to lay by money for their 
children. So busy were they that the restaurant 
claimed their labors seven days in the week, and they 
seemed seldom to find time for church or family 
prayers. 


46 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


Yet even while not living an actively Christian life, 
Loo Lin became known as an honest man of firm prin- 
ciples, whose life was a rebuke to many of the inhabi- 
tants of Chinatown. Finally, envious of his influence 
and success, some of these Chinese decided to get rid 
of him, and they started a movement to boycott his 
restaurant. 

Gradually his business declined. The Lins strugglea 
on until it was evident that some change must be made. 
Then it was suggested that in Florida there were good 
openings for truck farmers who could raise Chinese 
vegetables. Gathering their few belongings together, 
they went South to begin life over, arriving in Florida 
with just sixty dollars in their pockets. 

A friend was sent them in the person of a man of 
fine Christian character who owned a small farm and 
a horse and a cow. These he rented to Loo Lin. The 
whole family worked very hard, earning a bare living, 
but there came to them in those days an experience 
which was worth more than many dollars. 

“In the daytime,” says Mr. Loo Lin, telling the - 
story, “we saw the sun shining so brightly, making 
everything grow green and beautiful; and at night 
we went out and walked under the stars, and remem- 
bered the God who had given us everything. And we 
said to each other that we had been too busy making 
money in New York, and had forgotten Him. We had 
not prayed to Him as we should, we had not gone to 
His house and taken our children, nor had we set a 
good example to our neighbors who did not know Him. 


THE HAND OF A HELPER A7 


And so God took away our business, to make us re- 
member Him; and there in Florida we did remember 
Him, and promised to serve Him better. We were 
very poor in Florida, but very happy.” 

The family continued to grow, and after a time 
the little farm in Florida would not yield a living for 
them all. With new faith and hope in their hearts, they 
left the South and went to make a new start in Kansas 
City. 

It was here that Mrs. Loo Lin came to a decision 
which few women, even the most devoted Christians, 
are called upon to make or would be able to make. 
When people accept Christ as their Master as whole- 
heartedly as Mr. and Mrs. Loo Lin had done, He leads 
them sometimes by strange ways, and brings them to 
do things they would have thought impossible before. 

There came to Mrs. Loo Lin more and more the 
thought of the many children in China who have not 
the chance to learn about Christ’s way of living as she 
taught it to her own boys and girls. 

Too well she remembered the many thousands of 
little children running untaught about the streets in 
China who would grow up to worship in the old, mis- - 
taken way of their ancestors if somebody did not go 
to teach them. ‘Too well she knew that the few mis- 
sionaries and their helpers were not enough for the 
task. ‘The thought of the children of China was with 
her all the time, and the care she gave to her own boys 
and girls only made her heart heavier for those who 
were not taught and cared for as they were. Besides, 


48 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


she had been educated in a mission school, and it 
seemed to her that she owed a debt to her people who 
- had not had such an opportunity. 

Mr. and Mrs. Loo Lin loved each other sad their 
children dearly. Perhaps we cannot imagine just what 
the family and the home mean to the Chinese people 
and how hard it is for them to think of anything that 
will break up the home life. But Loo Lin and his 
wife had learned the words of One who said, “He that 
loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of 
me,” and they believed that He meant just what He 
said. So Mrs. Loo Lin decided that they must be sepa- 
rated for His sake, and that she would go back to 
China to be a teacher, taking part of the family with 
her and leaving the rest in America. If missionaries, 
she .thought, could make such sacrifices for China, 
could not one of China’s own daughters’ do as much 
for her own people? 

By way of preparation Mrs. Loo Lin began a course 
of training for kindergarten work, which took her three 
years to complete. During part of this time her family 
all lived in Kansas City, but later her husband went 
to work in Chicago. They placed the children with 
people whom they trusted to care for them. Later they 
found that the children were not being properly taken 
care of. Then a Christian woman offered to take the 
children into her home for a small sum, as she was not 
wealthy enough to keep them for nothing. | 

These were dark days for the Lin family, with very 
little money coming in, the home life broken, and the 


THE HAND OF A HELPER 49 


prospect of a long parting before them. They were 
often discouraged, but held fast to the faith that God 
was leading them. In Chicago, Loo Lin found many 
temptations to increase his small earnings in ways that 
his conscience told him were not worthy of a Christian. 

“One day,” he says, “I told the Lord, ‘Dear God, 
I need help. I am about to fall into temptation, and 
there is no one to help me but you. I cannot go on 
any longer unless you will stand by me and help me 
out!’ After that,” he said, ‘““God showed me the way.” 

He had taken the two oldest boys to Chicago with 
him, while the younger children—two girls and a boy 
—remained in Kansas City. He was obliged to place 
the boys in an orphanage to keep them from running 
in the streets. One summer they spent in a boys’ 
camp. Both of these experiences were good for them. 
They were well trained in both orphanage and camp. 

One day a kindly woman, visiting the orphanage, 
became interested in the eldest boy, Paul, and asked 
him how he and his brother David would like to spend 
the summer with her family on the shores of Lake 
Michigan. When their father came to see them, they 
were full of this project; and, as a result, they found a 
plain but good home with this excellent family at 
comparatively small expense. 

Mrs. Loo Lin had now finished her course of kinder- 
garten training, and came to Chicago to say good-by to 
her husband and sons. There was a sad yet hopeful 
parting. A few weeks later she sailed for China, tak- 
ing the four youngest children with her, Paul remained 


50 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


for some years in school in this country; later his 
father took him to China and placed him in.a mission 
school there. 

The path of opportunity now led Mr. Loo Lin back 
to New York. There he invested in a business which 
at first was not very profitable. Time and again he 
tried to sell it, but something always happened to break 
off the sale before it was completed. He came to be- 
lieve that this also was part of God’s guidance, when 
at a later date he was able to sell it for a much larger 
sum than he could have had earlier, and to invest in 
another business which returned him one hundred per 
cent annually. In fact, from that time he has greatly 
prospered. He is at present manager of the City Hall 
Tea Garden, a large and beautiful Chinese Testaurank 
on Nassau Street. 

In the meantime, he did not again give himself any — 
chance to forget God in his business. While he was 
investing his money, he was also busy investing his life 
for Christ in three different ways—in training and 
influencing his children, in helping his people in China, 
and in becoming a teacher and helper of the Chinese - 
in this country. 

He has made a number of trips to China to visit his 
family. Mrs. Loo Lin is still occupied in kindergarten 
work, and the children—six of them now—are all at 
school there. Paul, the eldest, is in Shanghai Univer- 
sity. On a recent visit, his father asked him what he 
intended to make of his life. The young man seemed 
uncertain. 


THE HAND OF A HELPER 51 


“There is nothing greater you can be than a Chris- 
tian missionary, Paul,” his father suggested. 

Paul hesitated a moment, and then burst out: 

“Oh, Papa, can’t I do something to make money? 
Missionaries have such a hard time!” 

“Paul,” said Mr. Loo Lin, very kindly, “if you go 
into business for yourself, you may be making money 
on earth; but if you invest your life in the Lord’s busi- 
ness, you will be laying up riches in heaven. Think 
it over, and see which you will choose.” 

Paul has now decided, and is in training to become a 
Christian worker. 

The second boy, David, had always been a problem 
to his parents. He was the one member of the family 
who was different from the others. The things that 
pleased his-brothers and sisters never appealed to him, 
and often the father and mother were worried because 
he seemed not to fit in with the rest of the family, or 
to share their purposes and ideals. 

A short time after the beginning of 1923, Mr. Loo 
Lin received a letter from this seventeen-year-old son 
which made him very happy. He told his father how 
he had taken a walk alone in the woods on the last 
day of the year, and had had, as he put it, “a talk 
with God.” He had asked to be made one with his 
parents in spirit and purpose—“for no boy in China 
has a better father and mother than mine’”—to be 
helped to understand and live harmoniously with his 
brothers and sisters, and, all his life, to be used in the 
service of God and man. 


52 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


So is the influence of these true Christian parents 
leading their children to follow them in paths of help- 
fulness. | 

While he has been visiting in China, Mr. Loo Lin 
has found many opportunities for service there. One 
day he was told that an aged missionary and his wife, 
whom he had known twenty-four years earlier, were 
living in retirement and poverty. He went to call on 
them, and found the old lady almost blind. When she 
heard his name, her face filled with light. 

“Ts it really the Loo Lin we knew so long ago?” she 
asked, and gave him a welcome so warm that it touched 
his heart. : 

Seeing in what poor circumstances they were living, 
he felt that something should be done for them and for 
others like them. He spoke to some of his Christian 
friends and, promising to give the first thousand him- 
self, proposed that they join him in raising funds for 
a home for aged and needy Christian workers. They 
are now engaged in raising $30,000 for this purpose. 

‘“‘And we shall get it,” says Mr. Loo Lin, “for we 
have a God who can do anything!” 

Another still larger undertaking in which he became 
involved while in China is the financing of a large 
hospital for lepers on an island called Tai Kam, in the 
province of Kwangtung. This project was started by 
a veteran missionary, the Reverend John Lake, who 
had labored in Kwangtung for twenty years, and had 
seen much of the widespread suffering caused by lep- 
rosy. It is to be a Christian hospital, offering not only 


THE HAND OF A HELPER 53 


bodily care and the remedies which have lately been 
found to arrest and sometimes cure the disease, but 
spiritual healing as well. 

The late Dr. Wu T’ing-fang, who was the Chinese 
ambassador to this country for a number of years, and 
who at the time this hospital was proposed was Acting 
Civil Governor of Kwangtung, was greatly interested 
in the project and donated a large sum of money 
toward it. He also approved a grant of the entire 
island as a leper colony. In 1918 the American Mis- 
sion to Lepers made a grant of $66,000 toward the 
fund. 

With Dr. Wu T’ing-fang, Mr. Loo Lin visited the 
island to inspect it, and was made a member of the 
Board of Directors of the new hospital. Dr. Wu’s 
former secretary is now directing, with Loo Lin’s as- 
sistance, a million-dollar campaign for the hospital 
among the Chinese in this country and all others who 
may be interested. The most influential Chinese in 
New York City are members of the committee handling 
this campaign. 

It is an honor to have a share in such a large under- 
taking, but it takes a greater soul to do the small, un- 
noticed, personal deeds of helpfulness which Mr. Loo 
Lin is constantly performing among the people of New 
York’s Chinese district. 

This is far less easy and attractive than going about 
on great campaigns, but it is so much more like the 
work the Master did. Chinatown, with its narrow, 
crooked streets, its strange, Oriental signs and odors, 


54 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


its rookeries of old houses, where many Chinese families 
dwell, desperately poor, but guarding jealously those 
few dark rooms against the intrusion of strangers— 
who but a man of their own race could reach into those 
narrow dwellings and win those shy, concealed hearts? 

Though he has been for many years a member of a 
church where the services are conducted entirely in 
English, Mr. Loo Lin gives his time and effort to as- 
sisting the Chinese department of the Church of All 
Nations. Here he attends worship, and also teaches 
in Chinese a Bible class of about ten men. He is, be- 
sides, president of the Chinese Y.M.C.A. of the settle-. 
ment to which the Church of All Nations belongs. 

The head of the Chinese department. writes: “Mr. 
Loo Lin is always going about doing good for his peo- 
ple. Whenever I call upon him to go to the prisons or 
hospitals to help a Chinese brother in need, he is ready 
to respond, and it is often through his loving ministry 
that these souls are led into the light.” 

An American woman who is greatly interested in 
prisoners, particularly those of other nationalities, 
came one day and told Mr. Loo Lin of a Chinese, 
no longer a young man, whom she had found in the 
Trenton Penitentiary, serving a twenty-year sentence. 
This meant that in all probability he would never come 
out alive; and over in China he had a wife and family 
whose poverty, resulting from his imprisonment, was 
making him desperately unhappy. 

Mr. Loo Lin went over to Trenton and visited the 
man, promising to see what could be done for him. He 


THE HAND OF A HELPER 55 


talked to him of the only hope for the troubled hearts 
of men, and gave him a Bible and other Christian 
literature. After he returned to New York, he made 
it a habit to send each week to this man the outline of 
the Sunday-school lesson, as he prepared it each Sun- 
day to teach to his own class. In the meantime, he 
was working for the man’s release on parole, under 
condition that he should be deported to China, where 
he might be able at least to keep his family from want. 

The man studied the Bible and the Sunday-school 
lessons faithfully. One day he wrote to his friend: 

“T wanted to be free and come to New York, to go 
to your church and try to find your Christ. But I did 
not need to go to New York to find Him, for He has 


- come and found me here in the prison, and I have given 


my life to Him.” 

The change in the man’s life became evident to every- 
one. His behavior was so excellent that he became a 
“trusty” in the prison, with a certain amount of liberty 
within its walls and with responsible work to do. Mr. 
Loo Lin continued to work for his parole and deporta- 
tion to China, the chances being greatly increased by 
the man’s good record. 

Every year it is the custom to pardon or parole a 
number of the best men in the penitentiary—not more 
than thirty. The warden became greatly interested in 
this prisoner and one day sent this word to Mr. Loo 
Lin: 

“T know that you have been praying for the prisoner 
you come to visit. He shows the results of it, for he 


56 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


is among the sixty-one best men in the prison, from 
among whom the thirty are to be chosen. Keep on 
praying that he may be one of the thirty.” 

A short time afterward, word was brought to Loo 
Lin that his man was indeed among the thirty who were 
chosen. He supposed that the man was to be released 
on parole, and said at once, ““Now he can be deported 
and go back to his family.” 

Great was his joy when his informant replied: “No, 
he doesn’t need to be deported. He has received a full 
pardon!” | 

The released prisoner came to New York, where 
work was found for him by which he could help his 
family much better than if he were sent back to China 
to work for small wages there. 

“So,” says Mr. Loo Lin, “the Lord gave me more 
than I asked for. I prayed to have him deported, but 
the Lord made him altogether free!” 

The man who had been pardoned did not forget to 
be grateful to his friend. One day he presented to Mr. 
Loo Lin a picture he had drawn, to show what he felt 
Loo Lin’s help had been to him. Up in one corner he ~ 
had drawn a great Hand extended out of the sky. 
Below rolled a sea of tossing waves, and out of the 
water arose the hand of a drowning man, clutching for 
help. Between the two stood the figure of a man, 
representing Loo Lin. With one hand he was reaching 
upward, to clasp the hand of God; with the other he 
was grasping the hand of the man sinking in the water. 
It is a true picture of a life of Christian service. 


IV 
A SOLDIER OF PEACE 


Ox the beautiful Inland Sea of Japan lies the an- 
cient town of Akashi, picturesque among its 
gnarled old pine and cypress trees. Long ago, when 
Japan was still under the feudal system, with its many 
ranks of nobility, the town was the capital where the 
Lord of Akashi ruled. Among his knights was a young 
man by the name of Kawai. 

Changes came rapidly to Japan. The old system was 
presently abolished, and Kawai was sent to Tokyo as 
the representative of Akashi in the Advisory Council 
of the new government. 

But Akashi had been on the losing side in the war 
that brought about these changes, and its representa- 
tive was not looked upon with favor at the capital. He 
knew this before he left his home for Tokyo, and sus- 
pected that his political enemies might do him harm. 

“A child will be born in our home while I am away,” 
he said to his wife. “I hope it may be a boy, to carry 
on our family name with honor. If anything should 
happen to me, so that I do not live to tell him of the 
honorable place our family has held in the records of 
our country, give him my sword, and tell him to be 
always a brave and loyal knight, and never to dishonor 
the name he bears, the name which has been borne by 
brave warriors before him.” 

57 


58 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


Kawai’s forebodings proved true. The party in 
power, fearing and hating him, plotted against his life, 
and he was assassinated. A few months later,-in the 
home in Akashi, a son was born to inherit his father’s 
sword, and was named Teizo Kawai. 

As the little Teizo grew, he was never weary of 
hearing his father’s message, and of handling his 
father’s sword, which was always his treasured pos- 
session. His mother, faithful to her husband’s wish, 
told him all the stories of the family heroes, until his 
boyish heart burned with the desire to be a great sol- 
dier and do valiant deeds, like his ancestors. 

One of the stories Teizo liked best was about his 
grandfather who had been admiral of the tiny feudal 
state of Akashi twenty years before Teizo’s birth, at 
the time when Commodore Perry made oe famous visit 
to Japan. | 

When the “black ships,” as the jiuee called the — 
American war vessels, were sighted off the coast, com- 
ing to waken Japan after her centuries of isolation 
from the outside world, the excitement among her 
people was tremendous. They thought the foreigners 
had come to invade and destroy their country, and 
every height along the shore swarmed with armed 
troops as defenders and the rest of the population as 
sightseers. | 

Admiral Kawai put his little fleet in order for battle, 
like the rest. But when it was found that the Ameri- 
cans had not come to make war, but were on a peaceful 
mission, he was chosen as one of the officials sent to 


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A SOLDIER OF PEACE 59 


greet the strangers. How wonderful it was to hear of 
the queer, white-faced people, with their red hair and 
green eyes—for so the Japanese speak of the blond 
coloring of the Anglo-Saxon race. And inasmuch as 
the Japanese fairy-tales all represent evil spirits as 
red-haired and green-eyed, it was no wonder that the 
sight of the foreigners filled the people with horror 
and distrust. | 

“Ugh!” exclaimed the old admiral, returning from 
the reception where he had helped to do the honors, 
and had met the foreign guests. ‘“‘These strangers are 
not like people; they are like dogs, with their hair cut 
short all over their heads! And their clothes! Instead 
of beautiful, flowing kimonos, such as every civilized 
person wears, they have close-fitting things that show 
the shape of their bodies—a tight, separate bag for 
each leg, and their arms just the same way! There 
is no fear that anybody in Japan will ever wish to copy 
the foreign devils!” 

“Mother, did you ever see one of them?” Teizo and 
his sister would ask eagerly, after this story was told. 

“Once I saw some foreign traders traveling in sedan- 
chairs,” replied their mother. ‘They were not from 
America, but from a place called Holland. All I can 
remember about them is that they smoked long pipes 
as they were carried along.’ 

Teizo’s mother was a very religious woman, and the 
children were never allowed to forget their prayers. 
In one corner of the parlor was a shrine with an image 
of Buddha, sitting, with his eternally clasped hands 


60 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


and his vacant expression, high above the children’s 
heads. Every morning their mother would take the 
children to this shrine, and they would kneel before 
it and repeat prayers out of a Buddhist prayer-book. 
They prayed for the best thing a Buddhist can pray 
for—which is to be made not to want or care for any- 
thing. 

In the living-room stood another altar on a sheli— 
an altar to the Shinto gods who are partly nature gods, 
partly the family ancestors. Every evening the family 
would light candles before this shrine, clap their hands, 
and repeat some more prayers. Unlike the prayers in 
the morning, these prayers were mostly prayers for 
health, prosperity, and safety for the household. 

“It was a Selfish religion,” said Teizo, years after, 
“only concerned with taking care of self. There were 
never any prayers for others.” 

Though Buddhism and Shintoism are quite different 
religions, and their prayers ask for such opposite © 
things, it never occurred to the children nor to their 
mother that they could not practise both at once—one 
kind of religion for the morning, the other for the 
evening! 

But long before the offering to Buddha, the sleepy 
Teizo was awakened each morning, while it was yet 
quite dark, to go to the house of a private tutor for the 
study of the Chinese classics. Teizo and the tutor 
would sit on thick mats spread on the floor, facing 
each other across a small desk. On the desk was one 
of the wonderful modern improvements which were 


A SOLDIER OF PEACE 61 


then beginning to come into Japan from this country 
—a small oil lamp, highly prized and admired as a mar- 
velous invention of the foreigner. 

By the light of this lamp, before the gray dawn had 
begun to brighten the paper screens, the little boy read 
and committed to memory page after page of old 
Chinese philosophy, which he did not understand in 
the least. Ii he made a mistake, the tutor would take 
the long-stemmed pipe he was always smoking, and 
give his unhappy pupil a resounding whack on the 
head. Happy was Teizo when the lesson was over, 
and it was time to run home to his breakfast of rice, 
“miso” broth, seaweed, and pickles. 

After breakfast he would take his padded fencing- 
clothes, somewhat like a football uniform, and his mask 
and bamboo foils, and go to the fencing-master for an 
hour of instruction and practice. No matter how cold 
the weather, even when there was snow on the ground, 
he always went to this lesson in sandals which left 
his feet almost bare. But the cold did not trouble 
him after he began fencing, for he always worked him- 
self into a glow; then he would run home, take a cold 
bath in water drawn from the well, dress, and start at 
nine o’clock for public school. | 

This was a government school, one of the first in 
that great and excellent school system which Japan has 
built up, and was much like an American school. But 
the standard at that time was not high and required 
little beside the ‘“‘three R’s.”” However, it was far 
better as a means of education than the early morning 


62 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


study of the Chinese classics, and it is not strange that 
Teizo often felt that the Bub ie school alone was all 
he needed. 

The shores of the Inland Sea are a wonderful alae 
for a boy who loves the water. Akashi is today a quiet 
but popular summer resort, and is noted for its ideal 
conditions for bathing. Even at that time, every young 
man in town was a good swimmer. Opposite the town 
is the island of Awaji, and it used to be the favorite 
test of an expert swimmer to swim across the channel 
to the island. It was Teizo’s great ambition to be able 
to perform this feat. 

His mother, like other mothers the world aN was 
never quite comfortable in her mind when she knew 
that her boy was in the water, and it was not always 
easy to get her permission to go. So Teizo did what 
most boys have done at one time or another. After 
school was dismissed for the afternoon, he would steal 
off to the beach without going home, taking care not 
to pass the houses of any of his claus who Hi 
tell his mother. | 

Yet it was one of his kinsfolk who sympathized with 
him in his longings for the water and who taught him 
to swim. ‘Teizo’s own words may best tell this story: 

“It was when I was about seven years old that my 
uncle took me out to teach me how to swim. He 
grasped me with one arm and paddled with the other 
until he had carried me far out into the sea. Then sud- 
denly he let me go, and I had either to swim or sinks 
I remember that I struggled fiercely and that I drank 


A SOLDIER OF PEACE 63 


great quantities of water. But no matter how hard I 
tried to keep afloat, I felt myself sinking. Finally, in 
despair, I stopped struggling and relaxed myself. To 
my surprise, I found myself floating. I cautiously pad- 
dled with my arms, and I saw that I was swimming. 
Thus I learned to swim. I often reflect back on that 
incident and realize that life is like swimming. While 
one struggles with his own little power, he will surely 
sink; but as soon as one gives himself up to God and 
trusts Him, he will float and be able to swim through 
life.” 

Constant practice soon made the boy an expert 
swimmer, though he was never quite able to command 
the strength and endurance sufficient to carry him over 
to the island. However, he came to be as much at 
home in the water as on land; and today, on the op- 
posite coast of the Pacific, his chief recreation when his 
work permits is to go to a bathing beach and prove that 
he has not lost his boyhood skill in swimming. 

About the time of his first swimming lesson, another 
new experience, almost as startling, came into the little 
boy’s life. It was no less than the entrance into his 
own home of one of those dreadful foreigners about 
whom he and his sister used to whisper with awed 
speculation. | 

She was not so terrible after all, this foreign woman 
who came to visit them. It was true that her hair and 
eyes were the colors that he had been taught to regard 
as the mark of evil spirits; but when he looked up into 
her face, it smiled so pleasantly that he forgot to be 


64 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


afraid. Somehow he did not feel as though she were 
really dangerous; there was no light of malice in her 
“oreen” eyes, no tone of unkindness in her. gentle 
voice. 

The stranger was a missionary who had come over 
from Kobe, with a Japanese Bible woman, to make 
some visits in Akashi, and had come to the home of 
the Kawais to get acquainted. ‘Teizo felt that his 
mother resented the call, though she received the visitor 
courteously as a Japanese lady always does. ‘There 
was an undercurrent of opposition at first in the feel- 
ing of the whole household. It was as though the 
Buddha in the parlor called to the Shinto gods in the 
living-room: “Our day is over now! We have lived 
together in this house in peace for many years, shar- 
ing the worship of the family between us. But now 
has come the messenger of a God who never lets any 
other religion live in a house beside His own. Scon | 
He will turn us both out, and rule alone here!” 

And so, indeed, it happened; for the pleasant-faced 
missionary won the heart of Teizo’s mother, as she had 
already won those of the children. Other visitors came, 
always bringing with them words about that One whom 
they called the only true God, and telling the beau- 
tiful, sad, yet comforting story of the Son of that 
great God, whom they called Jesus, who loved every- 
body, even women and children, and answered their 
prayers as the vacant-eyed Buddha and the ancestors 
worshipped at the Shinto shrine never did. And pres- 
ently the shrines were gone, and the mother and chil- 


A SOLDIER OF PEACE 65 


dren were proud and happy to be called by the name 
of Jesus Christ, who loved them. 

Teizo and his sister grew to be a young man and 
woman, and the question of a life-work began to con- 
front them both. The sister attended the Kobe Sem- 
inary, and for several years was a Bible woman. She 
is now the wife of a professor in a Methodist univer- 
sity in Kobe. 

Teizo went to the famous Doshisha, the school 
founded by Joseph Neesima, the great pioneer among 
Japanese Christian educators. At that time the school 
was not of college standing; now it is a great univer- 
sity. There he met an American professor, Dr. Davis, 
who had been a colonel in the army during the Civil 
War. From him the young man gained a different im- 
pression of foreigners from that of his early childhood. 

From the Doshisha he went to Waseda University 
in Tokyo. Here he met another American missionary, 
Mr. C. E. Garst, who exerted a great influence upon 
his character and plans. This missionary was a grad- 
uate of West Point, who had given up his commission 
in the United States army to help others find peace. 

Already Teizo had seen, in Dr. Davis, a man of sol- 
dierly qualities and bearing who had dedicated his life 
to the service of Christ. In this new friend he found 
the same sense of the higher values of a commission 
from the Master. 

The young man’s ambition had always been directed 
toward the life of a soldier. His father’s legacy to him 
had been a sword; his childhood heroes were all men 


66 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


of war. Naturally he had grown up to think it the 
highest profession of man. Now he saw two soldiers 
who had given up the paths of war for those of Chris- 
tian service. The more he thought of their choice, the 
more it attracted him. He also would lay aside all 
thoughts of earthly warfare and adventure to become 
a soldier of peace. 

In the university he became a leader in literary and 
religious circles, serving en the staff of a college 
periodical, and helping to organize the first student 
Y.M.C.A. in Waseda. 

As time went on, he grew more and more convinced 
of the urgent need of bringing Christianity into the lives 
of his people, seeing clearly how dangerous it was to 
permit Japan to become modernized without giving her 
the shield of a Christian faith to protect her against 
the temptations of her new position among the great 
powers of the world. Finally he decided to enter the — 
ministry, and, upon the advice of some missionary 
friends, planned to study in America. 

Coming to this country, Kawai entered the Bible. 
College of Drake University, at Des Moines, Iowa, in 
1896. After a three-years’ course there, he returned 
to Japan and held pastorates, first in Akita, then in 
Tokyo. 

Realizing that his Christian life was the result 
of Christian education and influence since childhood, 
rather than of a sudden conversion, he was inter- 
ested in the importance of Christian education. This 
brought him into active contact with the work of the 


A SOLDIER OF PEACE 67 


Sunday school. He was one of the organizers of the 
National Sunday School Association of Japan, served 
on its educational committee, and compiled several 
text-books for teacher-training courses. He also taught 
in the Margaret E. Long Memorial School for Girls. 

It was during these busy years that he also took 
upon himself family responsibilities. In 1903 he was 
married to a graduate of the Girls’ Department of 
Doshisha College. She, too, had been a Christian from 
childhood. 

Important as Mr. Kawai felt it to be that the gospel 
should be carried to his countrymen in Japan, there 
was one place where it seemed to him that the people 
of his race were facing an even more critical condition 
of affairs, and that was on our own Pacific Coast. The 
Pacific Coast, he saw, was the connecting link between 
East and West, and, unless the religion and spirit of 
Christ were to touch this link, the welfare of both West 
and East would be in peril. 

The Japanese on our Western Coast are not, for 
the most part, of the educated class. They are poor 
people, driven by poverty and the overflowing popula- 
tion of the Japanese islands to seek a living somewhere 
else; and the nearest place is the California coast, with 
its ideal conditions for.the raising of such crops as the 
Japanese knows best how to cultivate. But though it 
is easy to make a living in the United States, it is hard 
to make friends. 

Coming without education, but with industry and 
perseverance; having, like most immigrants, a simpler 


68 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


manner of living than our own, and thus being able to 
live on lower wages than Americans, while working up > 
to higher ones, the Japanese have caused many people 
to fear that they might get entire control of some of 
the coast industries, such as fishing, and the raising 
and selling of fruits and vegetables. So they are looked 
upon as dangerous intruders, and are avoided by many 
American-born people. | 

To reach and help these Japanese immigrants, a 
number of American mission boards have established 
work on the Pacific Coast. In 1909, Mr. Kawai re- 
ceived a call to take charge of the work of the Women’s 
Board of Missions of his own church, the Disciples of 
Christ, in Los Angeles, and has been there ever since. 

He is the pastor of a regularly organized Japanese 
Church. When he first came, it had twelve members; 
now it has grown to a membership of over one hundred 
and eighty. The Sunday school has an enrollment of - 
over two hundred; there are also an active Christian 
Endeavor Society, a Woman’s Missionary Society, and 
almost every form of activity that is found in our 
American churches. Three of the classes in the Sun- 
day school are taught in Japanese, for older people 
and newcomers; the other eleven are in English. } 

But this is only half of the work. Beside being 
pastor of the church, Mr. Kawai has also been for a 
number of years superintendent of the Japanese Chris- 
tian Institute, which is a part of the same mission. 
This Institute carries on an educational and social 
service work among the Japanese. 


A SOLDIER OF PEACE 69 


It is a busy place. “There is always something go- 
ing on at the Institute,” says its superintendent. Here 
are a kindergarten for the smallest children, and do- 
mestic science lectures for the girls and young women 
who need so much to learn the best methods of home- 
making in order to raise the standard of living in the 
Japanese homes. Here are sewing classes where the 
women learn to make American garments—for Teizo’s 
grandfather was mistaken when he said that no Jap- 
anese would ever want to wear the ugly clothes of the 
foreigner. Indeed, no sooner has a Japanese girl landed 
in the new country, where her Japanese clothes render 
her conspicuous, than she asks how she can learn to 
make clothes such as the American girls wear. 

New clothing for her tongue is sought no less eagerly 
than new styles for her garments, and here are classes 
of Japanese girls busily fitting their speech to the 
strange American pattern. Here, too, are a library, a 
playground, and rooms for games. Mothers’ meetings 
teach child-training, and there is even a mission study 
class. One section of the Institute is a dormitory for 
Japanese young men studying in college or high school. 
This is so popular that its income pays all current ex- 
penses of the Institute, except the superintendent’s 
salary, which comes from the Mission Board. 

The great problems of the Japanese in America are 
two—the lack of trained leadership, and the needs of 
the young people. We have seen how the Japanese who 
come here lack education and proper standards of liv- 
ing. To teach them how to live in the new country, 


70 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


they need, not so much American teachers to come in 
and give them occasional instructions, as men and 
women of their own race to become leaders among 
them, and teach them to think and live in ways that 
will seem less strange to them when they see ‘their own 
people practising them. 

Then there are the young people who are American 
born and who are really American citizens trying to 
live in Japanese homes while studying in American 
schools. People look on them all as aliens, and 
do not realize that these young people have been taught 
American ideals and are no longer in harmony with 
their Japanese surroundings. Yet they can find few - 
friends among American boys and girls. No matter 
how much they want to be Americans, they are con- 
tinually being pushed back into what Americans think 
is their place among the Japanese. | 

This can never be done. The parents understand 
little or no English. The children are trained in schools 
where English is spoken altogether, and they soon for- 
get all but the most common Japanese words. Soon 
the children look down upon their parents, who seem 
to them narrow-minded and ignorant; they break away 
from the home, and unless some friendly hand reaches ~ 
out to them, they will wander far away from the better 
things they have begun to want. 

Now, here are the two parts of the puzzle which 
careful hands like those of Mr. Kawai are beginning 
to fit together: a people in need of leaders on the one 
hand; and on the other hand their own sons and daugh- 


A SOLDIER OF PEACE 71 


ters—a generation of young men and women who might 
be trained for leadership. It is not hard to see how 
these can be brought together, if they can be united 
by the only thing that can hold the Old World and the 
New in one—the spirit of Jesus Christ. 

These young people are nearly all favorable to Chris- 
tianity, even when they do not take it very seriously. 
They have already broken away from the religion of 
their parents; the educated young Japanese never go 
to the Buddhist temples. They are proud to be Ameri- 
cans, and want to attend churches where English is 
spoken. They would like to do something for their 
own people if they knew how; but they can never go 
back with them to the old superstitions and the sense- 
less worship that consists in repeating certain words 
over and over again. A new religion, a religion of 
helpfulness and hope and progress, is one they can un- 
derstand; and this is what Mr. Kawai is trying to 
give them. | 

His own children—there are five of them—are fine 
examples of young Japanese manhood and womanhood. 
The eldest is a son named Kazuo, who is attending the 
Southern Branch of the University of California and 
also taking courses at the California Christian College 
in preparation for Christian service. The eldest girl is 
also a life-service recruit; the three younger girls are 
in the public schools. 

In the university where Kazuo Kawai is studying, 
very happy relations prevail between the Oriental and 
American students. There is little or no antagonism 


72 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


between the races. Kazuo is president of the Cosmo- 
politan Club and is a member of the cabinet of the 
student Y.M.C.A. He has frequently been invited, 
with other Japanese students, into American homes, 
and has there met Christian people of the finest type. 
His heart is in the land of his adoption, as a recent 
conversation with his father shows. 

It was at the time when there was much excitement 
over the California Land Bill, with its spirit of hos- 
tility to the Japanese. 

“Kazuo,” said his father one day, when they had 
been talking over the situation, “I do not think that 
this will cause war between. Japan and the United . 
States; but if ever the two countries should quarrel, 
my boy, which would you fight for?” 

Kazuo’s face grew very serious. 

“Father, I was born in Japan, and I love her!” he 
said. “I am proud of her splendid history, and the 
part my own ancestors have taken in it. I think she 
is the most beautiful country in the world. I love 
Japan! But, Father—” A new look came into his face, 
and he sought for words, but could not find them. At 
last he burst out, “But, Father—America is a great 
country!” : 

And what America means to Kazuo, it means to thou- 
sands of other young Japanese, who form the strong- 
est protection both East and West can have against 
misunderstandings that might end in war. 

Mr. Kawai’s work is not limited to his church and 
the young people who attend the Institute. Calls are 


A SOLDIER OF PEACE 73 


coming constantly from all over the city for his ser- 
vices, from Japanese of all classes. Beside this, he 
carries the gospel out to many who never come to hear 
it in the town. He has six out-stations with Sunday 
schools and preaching places. During the berry-picking 
season, when hundreds of Japanese employed as pick- 
ers are encamped in the fields, it has been his custom 
to go out and hold Sunday school for them. He takes 
a vacation each year from the work in the city, that 
he may go and hold evangelistic services among young 
men in the Japanese ranching camps. So much does 
this work appeal to him that he is now resigning his 
city work to spend his entire time in general evan- 
gelistic work enone the Japanese along the Pacific 
Coast. 

A few instances will show the kind of work he has’ 
been doing for the past fourteen years. 

One of the first men he met when he began his work 
in Los Angeles was an ex-sailor who had lived a riotous 
life in all the shipping ports of Asia and the Mediter- 
ranean region. At last he had drifted to America and 
had become a notorious “bad man” and gambler in 
the slums of Los Angeles. Somehow he came into con- 
tact with the work of the mission, and became a Chris- 
tian. The change in this man was marvelous. He 
became head janitor of a large apartment house, and 
always gave nearly half his salary to the church. Later 
he became a deacon of the church, and one of the most 
effective street preachers of the mission. His chief 
delight was to go down and preach in the gambling- 


74 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


dens to his former associates, telling them of the 
change that Christ had made in his life. 

A brighter picture is that of an orphan boy whose 
parents had left him a considerable sum of money. His 
uncle, who was his guardian, took all the money and 
refused to send him to school. But the boy was re- 
solved to have an education. He ran away when he 
was about sixteen, borrowing enough money to take 
him to America. He landed in Vancouver and went 
to work in a lumber camp to pay off his debt. Then 
he worked on the railroads till he came to Southern 
California. Ap 

One day Mr. Kawai was invited to dinner at the 
house of an orange rancher who was an active Chris- 
tian. Here he met the young man, who was employed 
there as a servant. Mr. Kawai talked with him about 
Christ, and the family helped, so that a short time 
later he became a Christian. He told Mr. Kawai of 
his ambition to study, and how he had run away from 
his uncle and come to America, hoping for a chance 
to go to school. 

“Before I became a Christian,” he said, “I wanted 
an education so that I could better myself; but since 
I have become a Christian, I want one still more, so 
that I can help other people!” 

Mr. Kawai took him into his home and tutored him 
for a few months, and then managed to get him into 
the University of Southern California. The young 
man had exceptional ability. While he was studying 
with Mr. Kawai, he became superintendent of the mis- 


A SOLDIER OF PEACE 75 


sion Sunday school which he handled with great suc- 
cess. He went on through the University, then at- 
tended the Pacific Theological Seminary, and has been 
pastor of the Japanese Christian church in Berkeley 
for the past four years. Now that Mr. Kawai is leav- 
ing his present position, the boy he picked up on the 
orange ranch has been called to become his successor. 

Here is another instance. 

About seven years ago, a man brought to him what 
Mr. Kawai describes as the greenest-looking, most 
awkward boy he had ever seen, to ask his advice. The 
man was a Japanese of quite a respectable family, 
who had lost his money in a business failure. So he 
had sent to Japan for his son and brought him to 
America, thinking that here the boy might be able to 
work his way through school. 

The case looked rather hopeless to Mr. Kawai, but 
he promised to do what he could. He took the boy 
into the Institute dormitory, put him in a class that 
was being conducted in the summer, somewhat like a 
Daily Vacation Bible School, and when school opened 
in the fall, placed him in the second grade. 

The boy surprised everyone by finishing grammar 
school in three years, and entering high school. About 
this time he became a Christian and decided to study 
for the ministry. Through him his father became a 
Christian, and when his younger brother came from 
Japan, he brought him also into the church. He made 
a brilliant record for scholarship in the high school, 
and soon became leader of all the activities among the 


76 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


many Japanese high-school students of the city. After 
graduation, he entered the University. 

Meantime he had become intimate with a promiitient 
young Japanese business man. When this man bought 
three large hotels, he made the young student manager 
of two of them, at a very good salary. Presently the 
youthful manager had saved enough to buy a hotel of 
his own. And before long he was able to make good 
all his father’s losses, and send him back to Japan to 
join his family. 

At present he is a junior in the University, taking 
special work in social science and religious education, 
he is an officer in the University Y.M.C.A., super-_. 
intendent of Mr. Kawai’s Sunday school of over two 
hundred members, and also superintendent of the out- 
station Sunday school at Gardena, Wee meets on 
Sunday afternoons. 

At the same time he is a prosperous business man, 
still owning his own hotel and managing the other two. 
He is thus supporting himself in college, sending his 
younger brother through school, supporting his parents 
in Japan, and carrying on active religious work. After 
his graduation he intends to study for the ministry. 

These are the stories of a few of the many leaders 
who are being developed by the work of Mr. Kawai. 
‘Peace hath her victories,” we are often told; and 
surely this soldier of the Cross has no reason to regret 
that he laid aside his father’s sword to serve his people 
and his two countries in a nobler way. 


V 
A DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 


od OTHER, mother! come and see the man with a 


queer thing on his head! How funny he is!” 

“It was evening in the little Syrian village of Abeih, 

on the slopes of Mount Lebanon. The mothers paused 

in their work and came to the doors, as the eager chil- 

dren urged them out to see a man wearing an American 
hat and clothes. 

“Tt is one of the Frangi (foreigners),”’ said one 
woman to her neighbor. “Why do they come to our 
country? Surely they are strange people! Do you 
know, I heard Assad telling last night that the Frangi 
have no bones in them!” 

“That is not so!” said another neighbor, joining the 
group. “Last week one of their women came and 
talked to me when I was drawing water at the fountain; 
and when she asked me for a drink, I felt her hand, 
and it was just like ours! But certainly, they are 
strange people, and I wonder why they come here.” 

“Do you not know?” put in a fourth, drawing nearer. 
“They have come because there are not children 
enough over in their country; so they come to steal 
our children and send them across the sea! First they 
will get them to come to their houses; then they will 
scribble some of their queer language on a piece of 
paper, hold it over the children’s heads, and pour on it 

77 


78 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


some sort of liquid they brought with them, and set it 
on fire. So they will bewitch the children, and make 
them fly over the great water to America!” 

“Yes, yes!”? mumbled an old crone from a doorstep 
across the way. “Hide your children when the Frangi 
come by, if you want to keep them safe!” | 

Under such difficulties the early American mission- 
aries to Syria labored to start schools for the children 
of those mountain villages. Little by little, their. kind- 
ness and patience won the confidence of the people, 
though it was a long time before the villagers could 
understand why anyone should want to teach children 
to read and write. That was something which the 
fathers and mothers themselves had never learned to 
do. If they wanted any letters written or read, there 
was the old sheik who traveled about with his ink- 
horn in his girdle, proudly displaying it as a sign that 
he alone, in all those miles of mountain side, had the © 
rare gift of interpreting written characters. Now little — 
boys and girls were supposed to learn these things. It 
was past understanding! 

In the Syrian villages of that day ieee were two 
distinct quarters—one for the Druzes, a sect of 
Mohammedans, and the other for the Negara or 
Christians. The latter were Maronites, and belonged — 
to the Roman Catholic Church. Between the Druzes 
and the ‘“‘Nazara” there was always hostility; and in 
the year 1860 there broke out a terrible massacre, 
when the Druzes attacked and killed every man they 
could find who went by the name of Christian. 


A DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 79 


When the firing broke out in Abeih, many of the 
Christians left their homes to take refuge in Beirut, 
about eighteen miles away. Among them was a family 
by the name of Alkazin, descended from the very 
earliest settlers of Abeih—a father, mother and six 
children. The mountain roads were rough, and it was 
a weary way for the children to travel. Mrs. Alkazin 
carried her baby boy, less than a year old; and the 
youngest girl, little Layyah, who was between three 
and four years old, was carried by the eldest sister. 
Now and then they changed, and the mother carried 
Layyah to rest the young girl’s arms. 

“Lay her by the wayside!” urged some of the neigh- 
bors who overtook them. “The Druzes are following 
fast; you can hear the shooting! Lay her down and 
leave her; she is too heavy to carry. Save the boy if © 
you can; Layyah is nothing but a girl.” 

“No!” cried the brave mother, clasping her little 
daughter closer. “I will either live with my Layyah, 
or die with her!” 

On the way an armed Druze met them, and stripped 
the mother of her jewels. It would take too long to 
unbraid the gold bangles from her hair, so he cut off 
hair and all. On they stumbled, hungry, barefooted, 
and half naked, with the shooting all around them; 
but the mother carried her little girl all the way. 

At the seacoast, the father was wounded by a bullet. 
He and the eldest boy threw themselves into the sea to 
escape by swimming, and the rest kept on to Beirut. 
There they found their haven in the American Lega- 


80 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


tion, under the shadow of the Stars and Stripes, and 
were cared for by the American missionaries, who 
lodged them under the trees in the compound-and fed 
them by means of relief funds. 

The father and brother reached their family after 
some days, but the father was so badly wounded that 
he died. The brother found work in Beirut; the wid- 
owed mother and the other children went back to 
Abeih. The whole village had been burned, but that 
village was home. Soon they had a one-roomed hut 
built on the site of their old house, with a cellar beneath 
and a kitchen shed across the yard. 

Here they took up their life again. The one room - 
had a divan running around two sides, and over it a 
shelf for dishes. The hearth, made of clay, was in 
the center, and as there was no chimney, in winter the 
room became black with smoke. There was no glass 
in the windows which were closed by wooden shutters; _ 
the chicken-coop stood just inside the door; and mat- 
tresses were laid on the floor at night for beds. But the 
windows looked out toward the Mediterranean with its 
ships; the brook across the road ran so clear that you 
could count the pebbles in its bed; the wild doves cooed 
in the old fig tree; and geraniums, carnations, and lilies 
bloomed in profusion around the little house. | 

“Children,” their mother would say, “blessed is he, 
and he only, who has his feet upon Mount Lebanon!” 

It was a happy life for the children, but a hard one 
for the mother. Day after day she went out to work, 
washing for others or sifting wheat, and receiving a few 


A DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 81 


cakes of Syrian bread as her pay. Often she gave all 
she earned to the hungry children and went supperless 
to bed. Sometimes there was not even bread, and the 
mother would gather grains of barley from the horses’ 
mangers and boil them with bones to make the children 
a meal. Through all the village Mrs. Alkazin was 
loved, and was sought out to care for the sick. 

In Abeih there were two day-schools established 
by the missionaries—one for girls and one for boys. 
Layyah was ailowed to go to the girls’ school, not to 
learn reading and writing, which were thought unfit 
for girls, but to sew and embroider. She soon won a 
prize offered for the best patchwork. But when Mrs. 
Bird, the missionary in charge, told Layyah to come 
_ to her house and get the prize, the child was afraid 
to do so, for fear Mrs. Bird would write a paper over 
her head and make her fly to America. At last she 
plucked up courage to go in, but her shoes were so 
old and broken that she left them outside and went in 
barefooted. 

Kind Mrs. Bird questioned the little girl, and found 
out how poor the family was. She offered Layyah a 
pair of new shoes if she would come to Sunday school. 
The child went, fearing punishment at home, because 
the foreigners were not Maronites, but taught a strange 
religion. But when she heard the story of Jesus, told 
so lovingly by the teacher, she said to herself: 

“Ts this the new religion? No, this is the same 
Christ that we suffered for in the massacre.” 

She continued to attend the Sunday school, and loved 


82 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


it more and more. And she loved the missionaries as 
well. When the frail hut of the Alkazins collapsed one 
night in a thunderstorm, it was to Dr. and Mrs. Bird 
that Layyah went for help, and those good people had 
the fallen wall rebuilt at their own expense. It was 
they, too, who persuaded Mrs. Alkazin to let them send 
Layyah to Beirut to the orphanage kept by German 
deaconesses; but confinement in the schoolroom was 
too hard for the “little wild bird” of Lebanon, and she 
was brought home very ill, to be nursed back to health 
by her mother. 

Now Layyah had an uncle in Beirut who was a very 
devout Maronite. Hearing of the girl’s devotion to | 
the missionaries, he determined to put a stop to it, and 
sent for her to come to his home in Beirut and wait on 
her grandmother. It was a piace of luxury after the 
mountain hut; but every day her uncle:made Layyah 
go to church, confess, and do penance for her sin in 
listening to the strange religion; and when, one day, he 
found that she had actually learned to read and write, 
he felt that the family was disgraced. 

He decided to find her a husband in Beirut, so that 
she could not go to hear the foreigners any more. 
Layyah wept and pleaded with him, but he thought it 
was the only way to save her from disgrace. One day, 
in desperation, Layyah slipped out and ran away, hop- 
ing to find some travelers starting for Mount Lebanon. 

Then the thought came to her: ‘“‘Why not go to the 
Americans? They saved us in the massacre—they may 
Save me now!” 


A DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 83 


She asked a man where she could find some Ameri- 
cans, and he directed her to the house of a missionary, 
Dr. Henry Jessup. Here the frightened girl told her 
story, and the missionary promised to help her. 

“You can stay as long as you like in my house,” he 
said; “and as long as you are here, you'll be protected 
by the United States flag.” 

Soon her uncle, her aunt, and her eldest brother 
came to Jook for her. When Layyah heard their voices, 
she was so terrified that she hid behind the valance of 
a bed, while Dr. Jessup answered the visitors and re- 
fused to tell them anything about the girl. He wrote 
to Dr. Bird, who came to Beirut after some weeks and 
took Layyah home to her mother. 

But home was no longer a peaceful place for her. 
Yousef, her brother, who was now the man of the 
household, reproached her bitterly for having disgraced 
the family, and determined to keep her away from the 
missionaries. 

“Many a time on Sunday morning I tried to reach 
the mission chapel, and when I came near the door, 
found Yousef standing on the highway watching for 
me. He would seize me by the hand and drag me 
home and give me a good thrashing. - Many a night 
after the little oil lamp was put out I waited until I 
thought they were all quietly asleep, and then arose 
and knelt to say my prayers. As soon as I began, I 
would feel a heavy hand on my lips, and hear Yousef’s 
voice in the darkness, saying: ‘You bad girl! You still 
want to follow the religion of the foreigners!’ ” 


84 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


In spite of this, Layyah managed now and then to 
slip away to the school; and at last, seeing her deter- 
mination, the family decided to let her go on week- 
days, unless she were needed to work at home. But 
they saw to it that the days she was needed were many. 
There were dandelions or other herbs to be cut for a 
meal, or she must go to the woods to gather sticks, or 
into the fields to glean barley, wheat, or lentils aiter 
the reapers. She picked figs and olive-berries, and in 
the silkworm season brought mulberry leaves and fed 
the worms—and all the time she was longing for an 
education, 

At length she heard that Dr. Jessup ae his family 
were coming to spend the summer in Abeih. One day 
she left her water-jar at the fountain and went to their 
house, to tell of her circumstances and beg them to 
help her go away to a boarding-school. | 

Dr. Jessup was busy just then on a book called 
Women of the Arabs, for which he was making a collec- 
tion of Arabic cradle-songs. He did not answer her 
plea, but asked, “Layyah, do you know any lullabies?” 

She recited to him the few she knew; then he asked 
if she would go among the women of the village and 
learn some more to bring him. : 

“T will if you will send me to school!” she answered, — 
and he smiled and promised to see about it. 

For three days she went from house to house learn- 
ing lullabies, and when she came back to Dr. Jessup, 
she brought him about a hundred new ones. He was 
greatly delighted. 


A DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 85 


“A girl with such a memory,” he said, “surely ought 
to have an education.” 

He wrote to the Sidon Seminary for Girls about her, 
but word came back that the school was full. 

That was a winter of great hardship and discourage- 
ment. There was famine, and the Alkazins suffered 
with the rest. Often Layyah had to go to Dr. Bird 
to ask for flour, for the American missionaries were 
the enly source of relief for the village. Sometimes 
the funds they had to distribute were not sufficient, and 
once Mrs. Bird sold a piece of silk intended for her 
own dress to get flour for the hungry women and 
children. - 

All this helped to win the hearts of the Alkazin 
family. Even Yousef was completely changed when, 
to take care of the missionary’s horse, he made a tour 
with Dr. Bird. The preaching and kindly conversation 
of the missionary, and the generous wages he paid, gave 
Yousef quite a different opinion of the foreigners, and 
he came home declaring, “Surely these are Chris- 
tian people!” 

After a time Yousef became Dr. Bird’s assistant; 
later he was a trusted inspector of mission schools, and 
in time he became a preacher. 

When Yousef and his mother had learned that the 
religion the missionaries taught was no strange doc- 
trine, and that the missionaries lived as they taught, 
the Alkazin home, with others in the village, was 
opened for cottage prayer-meetings. Neighbors and 
friends came in to hear the missionaries, and much 


86 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


seed was sown which grew up to make the ae of 
Abeih a better place to live in. 

When Layyah was a little more than fourteen years 
old, a letter came from Dr. Jessup asking her to come 
to Bae Away off in America, in the city of Phila- 
delphia, there was a Sunday-school class in a large 
church which had heard Layyah’s story, and had of- 
fered to pay her expenses at the American School for 
Girls in Beirut. 

‘“‘Are you ready,” asked Dr. Jessup, “‘to go to scHuel 
and study hard? Do you think you can learn to tell 
the story of Jesus as well as you learned those lullabies 
for me?” 

Layyah was sure she could, and entered on her new 
life with great joy. For two years her time was spent 
in learning all she could. In her third year at the 
seminary she taught a Sunday-school class of eighteen 
young girls who called themselves ‘Daughters of the. 
Cedars of Lebanon.” Early in the year the head 
teacher of a day-school connected with the seminary 
was taken sick, and Layyah was asked to take her 
place. Half her time was now given to teaching. The 
following year she taught the entire time, presiding 
with two assistants over a school of seventy or eighty 
children. ; 

The next year she was asked to go with a missionary 
to start a new school for girls in Tripoli, Syria. Here 
she spent a happy and successful year, teaching and 
going about with the missionary in the slums of the 
city, to gather pupils for the school. 


A DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 87 


The following summer a request came to Dr. Jessup 
for a teacher to be sent to Egypt, to take charge of a 
department in a girls’ school in Assiut. They asked 
for a Syrian, hoping she would be able to stand the 
climate better than the American missionaries. So 
Layyah, now about nineteen, left her native land for 
the African shore. From there, a journey of four hun- 
dred miles up the Nile lay before her. In her charge 
for the journey were put three young African girls, 
rescued from a slave dealer, who were to be sent to the 
school at Assiut. On this journey, stopping between 
trains at Cairo, she first met a young mission worker, 
Mr. Elias Barakat, whose little niece was also being 
sent to Assiut. , 

The work here was much more difficult than it had 
been in Beirut. The Egyptian girls were not accus- 
tomed to habits of 'tidiness, and it took perseverance to 
teach them to wash themselves and comb their hair 
every day. The climate was almost unbearably hot, 
and scorpions abounded. One night soon after her ar- 
rival Layyah found a large one under her pillow, and 
during that night captured fifteen in her room and 
the courtyard! Many a night she had to rise and take 
the ammonia bottle to some of the girls who had been 
bitten by the poisonous creatures. 

The girls came crowding into the school, and Layyah 
found her hands full. She was to have charge of the 
sewing, and as she wore European dress, all the eighty 
girls at once wanted to make dresses like hers. Then 
their mothers wanted clothes like the children’s; but, 


88 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


even under such difficulties, the girls became so pro- 
ficient under Layyah’s direction that their exhibit of 
work at the end of the year brought her much praise. 

Near the close of the year, two offers of marriage 
came to Layyah. One was from a wealthy young 
Egyptian who could give her every luxury but whose 
ideals were not like her own. The other was from the 
young Syrian teacher of the Cairo mission, Elias 
Barakat. He had formerly been private secretary to 
a British general who accompanied the famous Gen- 
eral ‘‘Chinese”’ Gordon through the Red Sea to Khar- 
tum, and had now for some years been engaged in 
teaching and in translating tracts for the mission in . 
Cairo.. Layyah was attracted by the first offer, but 
decided to accept the second, considering “‘that it was 
better to eat bread and salt and serve the Lord than 
to own all the treasures of Egypt.” : 

After their marriage, Mr. Barakat took charge of a 
mission printing-press, while his wife became principal 
of a small day-school of which she had formerly been 
an inspector and which was now being enlarged into a 
school preparatory to the seminary. In a very short 
time she had nearly two hundred pupils enrolled, with 
two assistants to help her. 

It was here that she was visited one day by an 
American, Dr. John Dulles of Philadelphia, who told 
her that he was superintendent of the Sunday school 
that had educated her. On leaving, he gave her a card 
with his address, asking her to write to his school about 
her work. | 


A DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 89 


The work was varied and eventful. Often rescued 
slaves were brought to. the mission—once a band of al- 
most eighty—and it was the privilege of Layyah to 
minister to the women among them. One runaway girl, 
who came to Layyah’s house with the chain still on her 
ankle, after being legally freed by the help of the mis- 
sionaries, became a member of the Barakats’ house- 
hold, and cared for the baby daughter who was born 
to them. | 

Three years flew happily by, and then came the great 
religious war that tore Egypt to pieces in the year 1882. 
“Death to the infidel dogs!”’ was the cry of the Moham- 
medans through the streets, and mobs rushed about 
with guns, clubs, and axes, seeking Christians to kill, 
wherever they could find them. 

Mr. Barakat and his wife, with their baby, had gone 
to Alexandria to spend the summer, and were caught in 
the thick of the trouble. For three days they lived 
in a state of siege with his sister and her family, hav- 
ing no food and scarcely any water, and keeping the 
hungry children quiet with the greatest difficulty. 
Under their windows they could hear the shooting 
and the groaning of the wounded Christians, and ex- 
pected every hour that the house would be raided. 

Taking advantage of a lull in the rioting, the little 
group put on disguises and planned to slip out sepa- 
rately and meet at the seashore, hoping to find a ship 
in which to escape. Dressed like a Mohammedan 
woman with veiled face, her feet dyed with the blood 
of the Christian martyrs, Layyah ran through the 


go LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


streets with her baby on her arm until she reached the 
appointed place on the shore. One by one the others 
joined her. They mingled with the crowds of for- 
eigners trying to get boats, and hoped to escape 
notice, but it was soon seen that they were not English 
or Americans, and they were told to go back and get 
passports. This would have meant death; so in the 
beautiful moonlight they huddled on the beach and 
prayed for deliverance. 

Suddenly a small boat turned its course and came 
directly toward them. The boatman proved to be a 
Mohammedan, but they fell on their knees and begged 
him to carry them out to one of the steamers in the - 
harbor. Although he was of the enemy, he took pity 
on them, crowded them into his little boat, and took 
them to an English vessel bound for Malta. As they 
were helped on board, they heard the booming of 
cannon and saw smoke rising from the city. Almost 
two thousand Christians were yet to perish before Eng- 
land got control of the situation. 

From Malta the Barakats went to Marseilles where 
they were advised to sail for America. The American 
consul got them tickets, and they started off to find 
friends in the New World. The only direction they 
had was the address on the card that had once been 
given to Layyah and now was left behind. They could 
remember only “Dr. Dulles, Philadelphia, Chestnut.” 
What “Chestnut” meant they had no idea. 

Arriving at length in Philadelphia, the Barakats 
wandered from street to street, asking for “Dr. Dulles, 





LAYYAH A. BARAKAT 


The little Syrian girl whom her mother was urged to “throw 
away’ during a massacre of the Syrians is now a mature woman, 
mothering the Syrian children of two hemispheres. 





A DAUGHTER OF LEBANON QI 


Chestnut,” while a crowd of children followed, calling 
them gypsies, Indians, and other names. No one 
helped them, except an old woman selling doughnuts. 
She gave them three of the cakes when she heard little 
Emily crying with hunger. 

At last a kindly policeman whom they consulted 
found in the directory that there was a Dr. Dulles 
who lived on Chestnut Street, and he put them on a 
horse-car which would take them to this address. 
Layyah, still shaken by her Egyptian experience, took 
the metal instrument at the conductor’s belt for a re- 
volver, and thought he was taking them somewhere to 
shoot them, until she saw him punch a ticket with it! 

They found Dr. Dulles out of town, but Layyah 
_ finally recalled that the pastor of his church was called 
Dr. Dana, and she asked the housekeeper to direct 
them to him. He.also was away, and now poor, tired 
Layyah sat down on the steps and cried, utterly worn 
out after a whole day’s wandering. 

The family started away again but were presently 
met by Dr. Dulles’ housekeeper to whom they had 
given their names on a slip of paper. 

She recognized “Layyah” as the name of the girl 
their Sunday school had educated, and followed them 
to ask, “Are you that same Layyah from Syria?” 

Friends were found at last. The home of Dr. Dulles’ 
son was opened to them at once, and he found them a 
quiet lodging-place. The church that had helped be- 
fore came to their aid again, and work on a religious 
paper was soon found for Mr. Barakat. 


92 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


Layyah had found rest, but often her heart was 
heavy, for she thought her work was at an end. 

‘Woe be unto me!” she cried to herself. “All my 
missionary work is over. I am ina Christian country; 
everybody in America is a Christian eabhna and there 
is no work for me to do!” 

Not long after, she was invited to an assembly of 
missionary women, and after the luncheon was asked 
to say a few words to them. | 

“Never!” she cried; “I cannot speak. I am an 
Oriental woman—I was brought up under the veil. I 
can never speak!” 

Then the president talked eran to her, tell- . 
ing her how much it would help if she would tell a 
little about her work as a teacher, and of the story of 
her life. Others came and insisted, and at last she 
slipped into a little anteroom and fell on her knees. 

“Open my lips!” she prayed. “Give me the lan- 
guage!”’ Then she went into the crowded auditorium, 
and when called upon, rose bravely to speak. At length 
she said: “That is all of my English.. When know more 
English, speak more.” 

As she sat down, a white-haired minister arose and 
said to her: “My daughter from the Orient, God bless 
you! Go north and south and east and west through-— 
out this Christian America, telling what God has done 
for you, and may He make you a blessing wherever 
you go!” lLayyah, with happy wonder, thought that 
he must have known the meaning of her name, -for 
“Barakat” means “blessings.” That hour was, she 


A DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 93 


declares, ‘at once the turning-point of my life and the 
benediction upon it.”” She found that there was work 
for her to do, even in a Christian country. 

It is more than forty years since Layyah Barakat 
began to go up and down America telling the story of 
her life, and the needs of her people in the Orient. 
No one who has ever heard her can forget her, holding 
in her hands her Arabic Bible, and translating from it 
freely into English, with a running commentary drawn 
from the daily life of Syria, the proverbs and beliefs 
of her people, until her hearers feel as never before 
that the Bible is a living book, and the things that 
are hard for our Western minds to understand grow 
simple and natural in the light of her explanations. 

Sometimes a life of traveling and public speaking 
such as Mrs. Barakat’s will loosen home ties and make 
the speaker less thoughtful of what she can do in her 
own community. This has never been the case with 
her. Philadelphia, the city which first received her to 
the. New World, has always been the place of her most 
earnest endeavors. Here her heart has been anchored 
by three unbreakable ties—her children, Emily (Mrs. 
Corey), and two sons, Samuel and Anees, all residents 
of that city; here she has labored for her Syrian coun- 
trymen, and by her untiring efforts to help them, has 
become probably the most influential Syrian in that 
city. 

In any national group in such a city there are always 
two strata. The upper class, consisting usually of 
wealthy merchants, has little to do with the lower 


94 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


class—the poor and ignorant people who have come 
over in the steerage and fill the city slums, trying to 
earn a mere living, and often in dire need of help. 
Between these two classes, Mrs. Barakat has been the 
connecting link. To her the poor and distressed come 
—not Syrians only, but Armenians and even Turks, in 
fact any who speak Arabic—when they need a helper. 
From hearing their needs, she goes with her tact and 
eloquence to enlist the aid of their wealthy countrymen, 
and gets help for many a despairing family. Not only 
with her own people, but everywhere, she willingly acts 
as interpreter and mediator. She has appealed to judges 
in behalf of Syrian prisoners with large families, who 
had been arraigned on trifling charges, and she has 
obtained their release. She has secured free legal ad- 
vice for those in difficulties, free hospital and surgical 
aid for the suffering. : 

One incident will show the nature of her work. A 
Syrian workman employed in a Pennsylvania quarry 
lost his sight through an explosion, due to a mistake or 
wrong orders of the foreman. At that time there was 
no compensation law in Pennsylvania. The man must 
either have become a public charge, or be sent back 
to Syria to beg for the support of his wife and three | 
small children. When Mrs. Barakat learned of this, 
she took up his case personally, with the aid of her 
attorney. First she gave the company that operated 
the quarry a chance to help the man, offering to settle 
the case out of court if they would give him three 
thousand dollars. When they refused, she took the 


A DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 95 


case into court, and won a verdict in the man’s favor, 
which, after paying all expenses, left an amount far in 
excess of three thousand dollars. The man, now pos- 
sessed of what would be a fortune in his country, went 
back to Syria and bought a farm, hiring help until 
his boys should be old enough to take charge of it; 
and, instead of being a public burden, lived an inde- 
pendent and self-respecting life among his neighbors. 

Under the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 
Mrs. Barakat had charge of work at the Philadelphia 
port for arriving Syrians; under the Pennsylvania 
Prison Society she has done great things for those who 
have broken our laws, often through failing to under- 
stand them. One of her chief ways of helping was by 
standing sponsor to paroled prisoners, who were re- 
quired to make regular reports to her for periods of 
from one to three years. She held Christmas and 
Easter services in the Penitentiary; she met released 
prisoners with clothing when they came out, and helped 
them to find work. 

One case was that of a man who had been confined 
in one of the state penitentiaries for second-degree 
murder. Mrs. Barakat had seen him only two or three 
times in the ten years of his twenty-year sentence be- 
fore his parole, but had corresponded with him, and 
believed he was worthy of help. When he came out, she 
took him into her own home and kept him there for a 
week, until she had found a position for him. 

“TIsn’t it dangerous,” her daughter asked, “to have 
such a man living in our house?” 


96 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


“Emily,” said her mother, “God always takes care 
of His children, especially when they are doing His 
will. He will not let us suffer for helping this poor 
man!” 

The man was a Mohammedan, and could find no 
one else to be his sponsor, so the Christian woman 
whom Mohammedans had persecuted from her child- 
hood became his helper. 

Other work of hers was the founding of a Syrian 
mission in the down-town section of Philadelphia, which 
became more frequented by Italians than by Syrians, 
and is now an Italian church. About five years ago 
she organized a neighborhood Bible class, which meets 
in various homes and which has ae one hundred 
members enrolled. 

So large a heart could not fail to be deeply im- 
pressed by the news of the terrible conditions prevail- 
ing in the Near East since the World War. Indeed, 
they came home with a personal meaning to Mrs. 
Barakat, when she learned that her own brother and 
sister in Syria had died of starvation. It was too late 
to. save them, but there were many more who might 
yet be helped by relief work; so she organized her 
Bible class to collect food and clothing, of which they 
gathered about ten tons at a room used as headquarters 
in Philadelphia. In tor19, Mrs. Barakat started to 
Syria to distribute this relief; but when she reached 
that country, she learned that the vessel which carried 
the supplies had sunk. 

Friends in America cabled money, and she wenk't on 


A DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 97 


with the relief work as she had planned. The follow- 
ing year she returned to America, and collected ten 
thousand dollars insurance on the cargo which had been 
lost. This she decided to use as the nucleus of a fund 
for an orphanage in her native town of Abeih. 

She remained in this country until 1922, collecting 
further funds for the orphanage, and organizing a com- 
mittee for its management, incorporated under the laws 
of Pennsylvania. The institution is known as the 
“Layyah A. Barakat Home for Orphan Girls.” 

She then went back to Abeih to put the orphanage in 
actual running order. It holds about fifteen girls 
now, and a much larger number can be accommodated 
when a suitable building is secured. Meantime she 
_ has enlisted the interest of many tourists in the enter- 
prise; parties of them are invited to visit the orphan- 
age, and their aid is enlisted in advertising and financ- 
ing the work. After spending more than a year in this 
way, she has lately returned to her home in Philadel- 
phia. 

In the Foreword of a little volume entitled, A 
Message from Mount Lebanon, in which she has told 
the story of her early life, Mrs. Barakat declares that 
the only purpose of the book is to make known the 
goodness of God in directing her life; and to all who 
read her story she says, ‘“My message is that if He can 
do what you shall read of here through a poor, weak, 
barefooted, Mount Lebanon girl, He can do far more 
through you.” 


VI 
A MESSENGER OF GOOD NEWS 


UT of the heart of the Carpathian Mountains 
there flows a little stream, gathering volume until 
it becomes a small river which men have named the 
Wislok. On its way through Galicia, in the region 
of the Ukraine, its banks are bordered by a number 
of villages. One of them is named Wislok, from the 
river itself. : | 
Along both banks of the river lies a thin line of 
houses extending almost five miles. Back from each 
little house, lying like a long ribbon stretched away 
from the river, is a strip of farm land, sometimes not 
more than ten or fifteen feet wide, but often a mile 
or two long. This strip, with the house which stands | 
on it, is supposed always to be the possession of one 
family only, and is handed on from father to sons. 
Some of the farms were once much larger, but in the 
course of generations they have been divided into 
these strips, so that each child might have his portion. 
Once in a while—oftener in recent years—the tiller 
of one of these long ribbons of soil grows tired of try- 
ing to make a living on it, and goes to America for a 
better chance. He sells his strip of land to a man 
who stays behind, so that nowadays one man some- 
times owns two or three or more strips lying in dif- 
ferent parts of the village. 
98 


A MESSENGER OF GOOD NEWS 99 


On such a farm in the town of Wislok, thirty or 
forty years ago, there lived a man named Ivan 
Halenda. 

A much-respected man, he was an able director of 
singing in the Greek Catholic Church to which all the 
people of the village belonged, and of which the 
Halenda family had been very devout members for 
generations. Many of them had become monks, and 
the records show forty-eight Greek Catholic priests 
who have come out of this family. 

It looked as though Ivan Halenda’s farm were to 
be subject to a great deal of division, for he had many 
children. Six boys and five girls played and worked 
together on the family acres. In the village, all the 
children had to work. The younger ones cared for 
the baby while the mother worked on the farm; those 
who were a little older herded the cattle, and the 
eldest ones worked in the fields with their parents. 
Many of the children were kept so hard at work that 
they got little schooling; but the Halendas always 
managed to send their children to school, so that they 
might learn at least to read and write. 

One of the boys, the one they called Michael, 
seemed to his parents to be fitted to follow the family 
custom and become a priest. They sent him to a 
higher school, or gymnasium, as such schools are 
called in Europe. 

“This is not the place for you!” said the teachers 
of this school, when he applied. ‘Schools are for the 
children of a higher class of people. Farmers’ chil- 


100 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


dren should stay on the land and Cullavate it; p tearning 
is not their business!” 

They allowed him to stay for a time, but later did 
missed him on some pretext. Then his parents sent 
him for some years to a school of mechanics. Soon 
after his graduation, he left home for America, where 
an older brother, Simeon, had gone two years before. 

By this time Ivan Halenda had died. The oldest 
brother, Stephen, was trying to do his best for -his 
mother and the children who remained at home; but 
he was married, and had his own responsibilities, and 
the younger brothers felt eager to do something for 
themselves. America called to them; and two years 
after the father’s death, the third brother, Peter, 
sailed for the United States. 

How different from the little village along the river, 
with its ribbon-like farms, was the country in which 
Peter found his brother Michael! It lay in the hard- 
coal region of Pennsylvania, in the Schuylkill Valley, 
where the streams ran black as ink, the high culm- 
banks frowned darkly over the landscape, the trees 
and shrubbery were blighted by the sulphur fumes, 
and the giant ‘“‘breakers’”—tall wooden buildings full 
of windows, in which the coal is washed and sorted— 
stood roaring and quivering with the vibrations of 
their powerful machinery. 

Inside these breakers there sat row after row of 
young boys, with a few older or disabled men who 
could no longer work in the mines. Beneath them, 
in long chutes, ran the constantly moving coal, washed 


A MESSENGER OF GOOD NEWS tor 


by a stream of cold water. From this moving mass 
the “breaker boys” had to pick out the pieces of slate 
and throw them aside. In cool weather their fingers 
grew numb from the icy water, and often they were 
cut or bruised by the coal and slate. Many of the 
boys were too young to be at work, but were kept 
out of school to help support the family. Back in 
Galicia also the children had been kept out of school 
to work; but theirs had been open-air labor, in the 
free wind and sunshine, not grinding, back-breaking 
toil like this! 

The younger children, here in the mining town, had 
often the task of tending the family cow or goat, as 
at home in the “old country.” But here it was not 
a matter of watching in a safe, open pasture. The 
hills above the town, where the cattle found scanty 
grass, were pitted and honey-combed with great holes, 
called ‘‘cave-ins.”” When the coal is taken away from 
under the ground, the earth above it naturally falls 
in, sometimes very suddenly. You might walk along 
one of the paths on such a hill, and come back an 
hour later to find that a part of the path had disap- 
peared, and make your way around the yawning hole 
by grasping stones or bushes. More than one cow 
or goat, and sometimes even the children who tended 
them, vanished in this way, buried under earth and 
rocks in some worked-out mine shaft. 

Smaller children, also, though not big enough to go 
far from home, were still subject to danger as they 
ran and tumbled in the coal dust that covered the 


102 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


narrow streets, and had often to be snatched by an 
older child from the way of the brewer’s heavy wagon 
or the trampling feet of the “fire horses.”’ With dogs, 
goats, and chickens they swarmed in and out of the 
dingy houses at will, or took a nap on the edge of the 
curb while their mothers toiled inside to provide for 
their many children, and often for boarders as well. 

A saloon flourished on every corner. In those days, 
it was the only place of cheap entertainment for the 
working man. Here he met his fellow workers, after 
the toil of the day was over, to discuss politics or labor 
conditions. Here he made and heard fiery speeches 
against the “Company”’ and all its works and ways. 
The “Company store,’ owned and operated by the 
coal company, from which the miners were obliged to 
buy at prices that were often excessive, was a favorite 
subject for criticism; so were the variations in wages 
and the exactions of the ‘“‘bosses.”’ Here were sug- | 
gested and planned strikes against the company, such 
as made more than one winter a time of starvation 
and violence in that unhappy valley. Here men drank 
and sang and played cards or dice and forgot for a little 
while that tomorrow the fall of a rock or a whiff of 
poisonous gas might end it all for them. 

What the saloon was to the men, the back-yards — 
were to their wives—their only social club, where they 
chattered in strange tongues across the fences, stop- 
ping now and then to scream at a child who was catch- 
ing the little chickens or teasing the baby. Deep 
under all their noisy laughter was always a listening 


A MESSENGER OF GOOD NEWS 103 


dread—a dread that listened for the sound of the 
ambulance that might come rumbling along at any 
moment, bearing the victim of a mine disaster. ‘Is 
it my man?” would run like lightning from house to 
house when that terrible rumbling drew near. No 
wonder a long sigh of relief rose daily to the lips of 
every miner’s wife when she heard his tired footsteps 
coming through the alley to the kitchen door and 
could fill the wooden tub with warm water for the 
nightly scrubbing of his inky face and hands! 

Into these gloomy scenes came Peter Halenda, a 
boy of eighteen. He was determined to support him- 
self, but for a time this was difficult because work was 
scarce, and he was not strong enough for heavy labor. 
But Michael helped him in every possible way, and 
he managed to live, though he did not earn enough to 
save anything. 

Meantime, back in the homeland, the next brother, 
Dimitry, aided by the village priest of Wislok, who 
knew the boy’s desire to follow the priestly calling, 
had left the village to go to school. In the course of 
time, he graduated, and then, with the youngest 
brother, Theodore, came to America also. For a time, 
Dimitry taught in a Greek Catholic parochial school 
and directed the church singing in Plymouth, Penn- 
sylvania. But in the year 1900 he joined Peter and 
Theodore in Pittsburgh, where they went to work on 
the North Side for the Pressed Steel Car Company. 

Not long afterward this company built a new car- 
shop at a place called Presstown—also familiarly 


104. LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


known as ‘“Hunkytown’”—near McKee’s Rocks. Here 
the company erected several hundred houses for the 
workmen, of the sort seen so commonly in the steel 
and coal regions—rows of plain, bare frame buildings, 
looking like barracks, and crowded to overflowing 
chiefly with young men who sleep on cheap mattresses 
usually flung on the floor, as many as can be crowded 
into the little rooms. Here, in the boarding-house 
kept by Wasyl Riopka, the three Halendas found 
lodging, together with a dozen other young men of 
about their own age. | 
It was not a life of great interest or variety for 
boys such as they. In those days employers took 
little thought for the way in which their employees 
might spend their leisure hours; but the brewers did. 
Every day the beer wagons went rattling about the 
streets. On Saturday they were particularly busy be- 
cause a double supply must be laid in for Sunday. 
On the morning of that day, the men—some of them 
already half drunk from their festivities of the night 
before—usually went to church; most of them were - 
Greek or Roman Catholics, who believed that the 
sooner they could get the business of church-going 
over and done with, the more of the day they would 
have for their own, to spend as they pleased. As the 
day went on, there would rise from the bare, wooden 
houses the thump of heavily dancing feet, the whine 
of accordions, the sound of singing in all keys and 
languages, the slapping of cards on tables, the harsh 
voices of quarreling men, and presently the upsetting 


A MESSENGER OF GOOD NEWS _ 105 


of furniture and the scuffle of a free-for-all fight. 
Then the patrol-wagon would come jangling up, and 
the bruised and bleeding combatants would be bun- 
died in and taken to the “lock-up.” 

To the Halenda brothers, this sort of amusement 
was not attractive.. They had been taught better 
things by their good father, Ivan; and these memories 
kept them from many of the temptations which were 
too strong for their companions. 

About this time some of the Christian peoples of 
Pittsburgh began to notice the neglected condition of 
these foreign-speaking workmen, and to plan some- 
thing for their benefit. The Presbytery of Pittsburgh 
persuaded Dr. Vaclav Losa, who was doing a success- 
ful work in Nebraska, to come. and start a mission 
in Presstown, where he would be especially valuable 
because he was familiar with most of the languages 
spoken in the community. The Pressed Steel Car 
Company gave him a house to live in, and he began 
to go about the town studying his field. 

As he went about, he saw only too plainly the need 
for such work as he was sent to do, but not so plainly 
how to make the beginning. The men were satisfied, 
it seemed, with their miserable way of living. Drink 
had blunted their desire for better things; hard work 
had left them indifferent and dull. For seven weeks 
he tried in vain to interest them, and during all that 
time he did not succeed in getting a soul to come to 
his mission. 

Deeply discouraged, he was walking along the 


106 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


street one Sunday afternoon when he saw in a back- 
yard a group of fifteen young men lounging at ease, 
_ laughing and talking. A great desire arose in his 
- heart, and he prayed, ‘Oh, God, help me to win the 
friendship of at least three or four of these young 
men!” 

He entered the yard and began to talk to them in 
his own language, which most of them understood. 
Soon they were gathered around him, and one of them 
went into the house and brought out to him a glass of 
beer. 

“No, I thank you,” said Dr. Losa. “That is some- 
thing I do not use, though I thank you for your kind- . 
ness in offering it to me. But I have something to 
offer to you, which is much better than that; it is 
something that will give you happiness, and ‘bring no 
trouble after it.” : 

From his pocket he drew a little Testament and 
opened it. 

“Listen!” he said. “Do you want to know who are 
the truly happy people in this world?” He turned 
to the book of Revelation and read, “Blessed is he 
that readeth, and they that hear the words of this 
prophecy, and keep those things which are written 
therein.” | 

For some time he sat and talked with them and then 
invited them to come and hear more at the service he 
was going to hold at the mission that day. When the 
time for the service came, he found that his prayer 
had been answered; for out of the group of fifteen, 


‘osens 
-ure] UMO I9Yy} UI pojutid soqrq Suryze} SI BpugzTeyy “A 3eY} ISoy} Oy] SIOUIWT O} SI 3] 


VINVATASNNGUd NI SYANIN DNOWV AUVNOISSIN OIAVIS V 








A MESSENGER OF GOOD NEWS _ 107 


four young men came to hear him—the three Halenda 
brothers and Wasyl Riopka, the “boarding boss.” 

The heart of the missionary was glad as he looked 
into their earnest faces, and the message he gave them 
was one of gladness also. He told them of the joy 
that fills the heart of God when one of His children 
believes His word and tries to do His will. They had 
heard much of God, but only as a stern ruler and 
judge, who had to be approached through many saints 
before He would listen to sinful men. Now they 
learned that the Father was rejoicing at that very 
moment because they had come to hear more about 
Him. The love of God entered deeply into their hearts 

that day, in the little mission house. 
_ They took home with them a copy of the Bible in 
Russian; it was not yet issued in the Ukrainian dia- 
lect, or, as it is also called, the Ruthenian language, 
but all of them could read Russian fairly well. Few 
Catholic families have Bibles, even of the Catholic 
version, and the priests do not encourage them to read 
it. So the four opened this Bible with intense in- 
terest. They read very carefully and carried all their 
questions about it to Dr. Losa. Their questions were 
many, because they soon found differences between 
the teaching of the Bible and the things their church 
had taught them. 

They began to talk about these things to their 
friends. 

“But this book that you have,” many of these 
friends objected, “is not the right Bible. It is a Prot- 


108 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


estant Bible, and is no good at all. Every true Bible 
is sealed with the bishop’s or the Pope’s seal; and 
there is no such seal on this book, as you can see for 
yourselves.” 

“Very well,’ said the young men, “we will get a 
Catholic Bible and see what the difference is.” 

So they managed to get a Bible in two volumes, 
which had been sent from Rome, and bore the seal 
of Pope Leo XIII. This they compared with their 
own Bible, and found that, except for certain pas- 
sages, It was much the same. The difference lay 
mostly in the explanations given by the priests, which | 
made some things sound quite different from the ob- 
vious reading of the text. 

Hot were the discussions that arose over these 
things, but the four men became stronger every day 
in their belief that they had found the real truth; and 
before long they confessed this faith and joined the 
little mission. 

This made their former friends very angry, and 
they began to persecute the converts in ‘every possible 
way. They were put out of the various organizations 
of their countrymen to which they belonged, were 
hissed on the streets and at their work, and were 
called heretics and traitors. 

Their changed way of living also gave great offense 
to their companions. They had always kept away 
from the worst vices of the place, but now they gave 
up entirely all smoking, drinking, dancing, card-play- 
ing, and everything which seemed to them to make it 


A MESSENGER OF GOOD NEWS 109 


harder for people to serve God faithfully. Of course 
their former friends resented all this greatly, and 
abused them for trying to be better than others. 

Shortly after their conversion to the Protestant 
faith, the Pittsburgh Presbytery asked the three 
Halendas to give up their employment and devote 
their whole time to carrying the Bible into the homes 
of the people. So they became colporteurs, or Bible 
distributers. At that time, in this region, only about 
five families out of every hundred had a Bible of any 
kind. Though it paid them far less than they had 
been earning, the brothers took up this work because 
they felt that it was greatly needed, and that it was 
a privilege to be able to help people learn the truth. 

When their companions found that persecution had 
no effect on the young converts, they began to write 
home to their people about them. Wasyl Riopka had 
a brother in Europe who grew very angry when he 
learned that his brother had become a Protestant. He 
called in all his neighbors and relatives, and they all 
mourned over this terrible news and discussed what 
could be done about it. 

“T will go to America myself and see Wasyl,” at 
last the brother declared. “I will bring him back to 
the faith of our fathers, or I will kill him with my 
own hands! It is better for him to die than to live 
in such disgrace!” 

And the zealous brother actually did come to 
America. But he was not able to turn Wasyl back 
to the old faith; for before he had time to carry out 


110 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


his threat, the truth his brother explained to him took 
hold of his own heart, and he also became a reader 
of the Bible and a member of the mission church. 

The Halenda brothers had one trial even harder 
to bear than all the persecutions of their former com- — 
panions. Some of their countrymen reported to their 
mother, at home in Wislok, that her sons in America 
had become heretics and infidels, and had given up 
the religion of their fathers. Their mother wept and 
would not be comforted; at last she wrote her sons: 
“My children, I am growing old, but still I had ex- 
pected to live a few years longer. Now, since I hear 
that you have given up the religion of your father, 
and of his forefathers, I am broken down by grief; 
and unless you recant, I shall go down before my time 
to the grave, with a broken heart!” | 

The sons wrote letter after letter to their mother, 
trying to explain to her what the change in their lives 
really meant, but she could not understand. At last - 
Peter said: “I will go home and see our mother, and 
talk with her. Perhaps I can explain things better.” 

So he went home to Wislok and visited his mother, 
striving to comfort and reassure her. It was a trying 
visit, for the priest of the village argued with him and 
warned everyone against him. His people were only 
a little consoled by what Peter told them; but some 
time later, the old mother herself came to America 
with one of her daughters, and visited her sons. 
Then what she saw of their lives and work, and the 
kindness shown to her by Protestant people, convinced 


A MESSENGER OF GOOD NEWS © i111 


her that they were right, and she as well as the sister 
became Protestants also. | 

All three brothers had started their work as col- 
porteurs, but after a time the two younger ones began 
to follow different lines of Christian service. Dimitry, 
the second of the trio, went to Mount Hermon, Mr. 
Moody’s school, in Massachusetts. Afterward he at- 
tended the Pittsburgh Academy, and then the Western 
Theological Seminary, and became a minister. ‘Theo- 
dore also entered the ministry, and is now serving a 
church in Hartford, Connecticut. 

In 1907, Dimitry went home to Wislok to see his 
relatives. The priest was ready to oppose him also, 

and they had many long arguments about the differ- 
ences in their beliefs. When Dimitry returned to 
America, the priest said to the oldest brother, Stephen 
Halenda, “I don’t wonder that so many of our people, 
over there in America, are converted to Protestantism, 
for if Dimitry had been here much longer, I am afraid 
he would have converted me, too!” 

On his return the young man—now the Reverend 
Dimitry Halenda—took up again a work which he 
had started while still in the seminary. On the South 
Side of Pittsburgh he had organized and taught a 
night school, then had organized a Sunday school, and 
finally a church—a congregation of Ukrainian people, 
of which he is still the pastor. 

When he began this work, he met with great oppo- 
sition. He was called all sorts of names, was pointed at 
on the street, and the very people he sought to help 


112 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


would cross the street to avoid him or shut their 
doors in his face. Children who came to his Sunday 
school were punished both by their parents and by 
their teachers in the Catholic parochial schools. 
Through it all, the young pastor kept calm, patient 
and friendly, never showing resentment, but always 
ready to help and serve, until he won their respect 
and confidence, and finally their hearts. In this way 
he won one of his first and strongest converts. ‘This 
man came to him one day and said: 
“T have decided that I want to join your church.” — 
“And how does that happen?” asked Pastor 
Halenda. 
“Well, you see,” said the man, “whenever I have 
gone to my Greek Catholic Church, I have been hear- 
ing the priest talking against you and telling the peo- 
ple to have nothing to do with you. But when I have 
come to your services, I have heard you pray for ail 
your enemies, and for those very priests who oppose 
you so bitterly, and I believe that yours is the real 
religion of Christ.” Ried: 
Without wearying, this faithful missionary has 
gone about helping his people wherever he could—in 
their homes, at their work, in hospitals, in courts and 
in prisons. Instead of being hated, he is now the 
best-loved man in that part of the city, and the whole 
attitude of the people toward the Protestant faith has 
changed. In his Daily Vacation Bible School fast 
summer he taught children of eleven different nation- 
alities. 


_A MESSENGER OF GOOD NEWS 113 


He has a beautiful little church, built by the gift 
of an American lady. In this church more than five 
hundred people have been converted, though only 
about a hundred are now members of the church. 
The rest, moving from place to place in search of 
work, have carried out the influence of the church 
all over the United States and Canada, and even back 
to their own country, from which constant requests 
are coming that Protestant missionaries be sent there. 

Peter Halenda has always remained a colporteur, 
and has devoted more than twenty years of efficient 
and devoted service to carrying the Bible to people 
of all nationalities. When he began, as we have seen, 
there were about five in every hundred homes that 
possessed a Bible. Now the number is about sixty- 
five in a hundred. He distributes Bibles in twenty- 
four languages—before the war, in thirty-six. At 
present Bibles in certain languages are not being 
printed. He has soid about fifteen thousand dollars’ 
worth of Bibles, Testaments, and other books, and 
at least one-half million pages of tracts. 

As he goes from house to house, this question meets 
Mr. Halenda everywhere, “How dare we read this 
book, which is forbidden by the priest?” 

By way of reply, he quotes the words Dr. Losa 
brought to him years ago, “Blessed is he that readeth, 
and they that hear the words: of this prophecy.” 

Then they ask him why the priest forbids it; and 
he tells them how, many years ago, the Catholic 
Church neglected the Book of God and taught the 


114 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


people legends and traditions instead. He tells them 
how, in the course of time, a wise man here and there 
would find a copy of the Bible and read it and would 
realize what a treasure he had found and wish to 
share it with others. He explains that all the copies 
were in Greek or Hebrew or Latin, and that the people 
who were not scholars could not read them. So, he 
goes on, these unselfish men began to translate the 
Bible into the every-day language of their people— 
some in Germany, others in France, still others in 
Switzerland, in Sweden and in England; and people 
began to read it eagerly, and to see that they had been > 
mistaken about many things: Then, he adds, they 
were very glad, because they learned that through 
Jesus Christ we can come directly to God with all our 
needs, with no priest or saint to stand between. 

This coming back to the Bible was what we know 
as the Reformation, or the “making over” of the 
church; and the men who translated the Bible— - 
Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Wyclif, and others—are called 
the “reformers.” The Roman Catholic Church cast 
them out, with those who followed them, because they 
protested against its wrong teaching; and this is why 
the non-Catholic churches today are known as 
“Protestant.” 

Sometimes he finds readers among people who are 
ready to give up all religion because of the way in 
which they have seen it practised. One such case was 
that of a family belonging to a church whose priest 
was a money-loving and selfish man. The father of 


A MESSENGER OF GOOD NEWS 115 _ 


this family had his back broken in a mine accident 
and became paralyzed. He had been in the hospital 
six months, but nothing could help him; and now he 
had lain six months more on his bed at home, helpless 
and discouraged. One day, feeling very weak, and 
fearing that he was about to die, he sent for the priest 
to come and hear his confession. 

After the confession, the miner’s wife brought out 
a little glass with some change in it, and told the 
priest to take out his fee from the glass, which con- 
tained about three dollars. The priest declared that 
this was not enough. 

Then the woman explained: ‘We have four chil- 
dren, and nobody knows how hard it is to take care 
of them and of my poor, crippled husband. ‘There 
are no factories here for me to work in, but I get a 
little money from my kind-hearted neighbors. They 
pay me fifty cents a day for doing their washing, or 
twenty-five cents for helping to clean house, and some- 
times not that much. All I have are the pennies and 
nickels in this glass. JI have nothing else unless I[ 
should give you one of my children!” 

The priest, without a word, emptied the glass into 
his pocket and walked out of the house, leaving them 
without a penny. 

“The poor, crippled man,” writes Mr. Halenda, 
“was telling me his story with tears in his eyes. So 
I opened the Bible and read to him, comforting him 
with the help of God. Then I asked him if he would 
like to have that book, and he said he would like to 


116 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


have it very much, but it was impossible for him to 
pay for it. Of course I gave him the Bible outright. 
He thanked me many times, and I was very glad to 
be able to help such a poor and helpless family.” 

Not all of Mr. Halenda’s visits are as safe and 
pleasant as this one. Often he goes into places where 
men are playing cards and smoking, and where he is 
roughly told that nobody has any time to listen to 
him. Usually, instead of leaving, he waits patiently 
till their game is finished, and then asks permission 
to tell them about something better than cards. Often 
his patience and courtesy win him purchasers, after 
they have seen that he cannot be discouraged by their 
rudeness. 7 

Some of his time he spends among the Negroes, in 
the district known as the worst part of the hill section 
of Pittsburgh. Once he was warned by Negro men 
not to enter a certain flat where there was constant 
fighting and in which someone was killed almost 
every month. There were over a hundred families, 
all Negroes, living in that tenement. In spite of the 
warning, he went into the building, and sold thirty- 
five Bibles there. In the worst part of the hill dis- 
trict he has sold over four hundred Bibles. 

As he goes from house to house, he finds many op- 
portunities of helping people. One evening, while 
working in Coraopolis, an order was given him for a 
Bible to be delivered on Neville Island. He delivered 
the Bible, and was on his way home to attend an 
entertainment in the church that night, when he 


A MESSENGER OF GOOD NEWS © 117 


began to feel troubled because he had not visited any 
of the houses in the neighborhood. His sense of duty 
undone was so strong that he turned back to make 
some calls. At the very first house, as he stood at the 
door, he heard sounds of bitter crying within. He 
knocked, and a woman came to the door with tears 
running down her face. She told him, between her sobs, 
that her husband had beaten her very severely and 
had then taken all the money in the house and had 
run away, leaving her sick and penniless. 

“JT might just as well jump into the river and be 
out of my misery,” she said, “unless you can tell me 
what to do. Surely God has sent you to me at the 
darkest hour of my life!” 

“Yes, God has sent me to help you,” said the good 
colporteur, and he gave her great comfort by his kind 
words. Next day he went with her to the Pittsburgh 
post-office, where her husband had several hundred 
dollars in Postal Savings. He told the officials of her 
destitute condition and secured fifty dollars at once 
for her. Later on she became a member of the 
church and attends regularly every Sunday. 

It has been the great mission and glory of the 
Protestant Church, down to the present day, to give 
the Bible to all people in their own tongue. That is 
why Mr. Halenda and many others have given their 
lives to carrying the Book of Truth to those who are 
without it. “How beautiful upon the mountains,” 
says the Book, “are the feet of Him that bringeth 
good tidings!” 


VIL". 
A SHINING LIGHT 


ii the dooryard of a New Mexican home, one morn- 
ing about forty years ago, a little boy of eight was 
busy at his play. Presently an uncertain step sounded 
on the threshold of the house, and in the doorway an 
old man appeared. His eyes were dim with age, and 
he stood peering out vaguely into the strong sun-. 
light that kindled his white hair into a crown of 
silver. | | 

“(Where are my eyes?” he called aloud. “I need my 
eyes this morning!”’ : 

At once the little boy jumped up. “Here I am, 
Grandfather! Here are your eyes!” he cried. “Are we 
going driving this morning?” ne 

“Yes, Ambrosio,” replied the old man. “TI have ~ 
a ibe: of calls to make, and I eel borrow “hid 
bright eyes to find the way for me.’ 

“T like to be your eyes and take you driving, Grand- 
father, ” said the boy, hastening to bring the little pony 
and hitch him to the cart. Don Ambrosio Gonzales 
groped his way, smiling, into the house to find his 
hat. 

Soon the two were seated side by side, driving hap- 
pily along in the morning brightness of forty years 
ago. Don Ambrosio Gonzales, the grandfather, was 


going to make calls on some members of his congrega- 
118 


A SHINING LIGHT 119 


tion, and on some others whom he was trying to in- 
terest in attending church; for he had been the first 
Protestant Mexican in all the territory of New Mexico, 
and had become the first Mexican preacher in the whole 
United States. 

Little Ambrosio, his namesake, had come to live 
with his grandparents when he was only a year old. 
His parents were living, but, with their six other chil- 
dren, they had been rich enough to spare Ambrosio to 
be the joy and help of his aged grandfather. 

As the old gentleman and the little grandson bumped 
along over the uneven roads in the little cart, they 
talked, as they often did, of the days when Grand- 
father Ambrosio was young; of how he had grown up 
among neighbors who were ignorant and superstitious, 
believing in all sorts of charms and witchcraft, and 
knowing nothing of real faith in a loving God, nor 
much of any religion except what was told them now 
and then by traveling priests. : 

“T had a better education than most of them,” said 
Don Ambrosio, “but I grew up with my soul in the 
dark. It was just thirty years ago that the light of 
God’s truth began to shine for me.” 

“Tell me about it, Grandfather!” begged the boy. 

“You have heard it so often,” said his grandfather, 
“that I think you ought to be able to tell it yourself!” 

“But I like to hear it!” persisted the boy, and Don 
Ambrosio willingly began. 

“There was a good man, a Methodist minister, 
named Nicholson,” he said. ‘When he came to 


120 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


Peralta, I was glad to entertain him in my home, be- 
cause he was a kind and friendly man, and I could 
see that he came to try to do good to our people. 

“Before he left, he said to me, ‘Don Ambrosio, I 
know that you are one of the few people about here 
who have an education and can read weil: I wonder 
if you would not be interested in a book I have here. 
I will gladly give it to you to read, and if ia like it, 
you may keep it.’ 

“T took the book and began to read. It was a Bible 
—the first Bible of any kind I had ever seen. I started 
at the beginning, and it told a wonderful story of how © 
God made the world, and all the plants and animals, 
and then men and women. I read on, finding the stories 
of Noah and his ark, of Abraham and Jacob and 
Joseph. The rest of the family went to bed, but I was 
not sleepy; so I sat reading further and further in that 
wonderful book. 

“After a long while, I thought I would turn to the 
second part of the book—for I saw that it was divided 
into two parts—and see what that was about. I soon 
found it was about our Lord Jesus Christ and His won- 
derful words and deeds. I knew a little about Him, 
what the priests had taught us; but I had never read 
for myself just what He said and did. I began to read 
His words in the Gospel of John, and it was just as if 
He spoke to me Himself, when I read, ‘Let not your 
heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.’ 

“As I read on and on, suddenly I heard a sound 
outside. It was the chickens in the pen beside the 


A SHINING LIGHT 121 


door, and already they were crowing for daybreak! I 
had read all night! 

“Then I found that I was very tired and sleepy, so 
I lay down on the couch there in the living-room, and 
fell asleep. When I woke it was broad daylight, and 
the sun was streaming through the window, shining di- 
rectly on my face. But the light in my heart was 
brighter still, for now I knew that God was my loving 
Father, and that I need never be troubled or afraid of 
anything again!” 

‘“‘And then you wanted to be a preacher,” said the 
boy, who knew the story by heart. 

“Yes, I wanted to tell everybody the good news that 
had come to me,” said the white-haired minister. “TI 
am growing old, and [I shall not go about much longer, 
teaching and preaching; for my sight is almost dark- 
ened, and if my Ambrosio were not eyes for me, I 
would have had to give up my work before this. But 
the brightness is still in my heart, just as it was when 
I woke up that morning and saw the sunshine pouring 
in the window, and the good Book lying beside me 
on the table!” 

There were not to be many more of these happy 
drives together. ‘The next year, when Ambrosio was 
nine years old, his grandfather fell ill. One day he 
called the boy to his bedside and made him kneel down 
beside him, putting his hand lovingly on the shining 
dark hair. 

“Ambrosio, my dear boy,” he said, “I am going to 
leave you very soon. You have my name, and I am 


122 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


glad to think there will still be an Ambrosio Gonzales 
to take my place. I wish that you might take up my 
work also, when you are old enough, and become a 
minister of the gospel, to carry the good news as I 
have tried to do.” 

Not long after this, Grandfather Ambrosio died. 
Ambrosio missed him very much, but after all he was 
a very little boy, and the memory of his grandfather’s 
words was soon put away on one of the back shelves of 
his busy mind, to lie there for many a day unremem- 
bered. | 

The boy went back to his parents for a time; but it 
was not long before an uncle, who kept a saloon in 
connection with a store, offered to take Ambrosio ta 
live with him, to help him wait on customers. 

In these surroundings, the memory of Don Ambrosio 
and his Book grew dimmer and more dreamlike every 
day. There was nothing in the new life to remind him 
of his grandfather’s wish; if he ever thought of it, it 
had no attraction for him. The gossip of the store, the 
noisy talk of the saloon, filled his ears and his mind. 

The uncle found Ambrosio a prompt and intelligent 
helper. At last one day he said to the growing boy: 

‘Ambrosio, you do not want to spend all your life 
as a bartender. I think you would make a good busi- 
ness man if you had more education. Suppose I send 
you to school for a few years, and then you can come 
back here and be my partner.” 

Ambrosio felt large and manly. 

“Where shall I go to school?” he asked. 


| 
Hi 
i 
| 
| 
| 





AMBROSIO C. GONZALES 


Mr. Gonzales is pastor of a Spanish-American mission in the 
Southwest from which, in thirteen years, twelve new preaching 
centers have been developed. Counting both. the American-born 
Spanish-speaking people and the Mexican immigrants, we have 
now about a million and a half people in this country whose lan- 
guage is Spanish. 





A SHINING LIGHT 123 


“Well,” said his uncle, ‘the best school I know in 
this part of the country is the Boys’ Biblical College 
in Albuquerque. They will give you a good practical 
training, as well as habits of industry and thrift.” 

“But that is a preacher school!” said Ambrosio, in 
surprise. “I do not want to go there, if I am to learn 
to be a merchant and saloonkeeper!”’ 

“They will give you a good education,” said his 
uncle. “It does not matter what you are going to be 
afterward. You do not have to become a preacher 
just because they train them at the school.” 

So Ambrosio entered Albuquerque College, one of 
the most successful home mission institutions of the 
great Southwest. | 

We can hardly imagine today what it meant to the 
boys and girls of the New Mexico of that day to have 
such a school to attend as this college and the Har- 
wood Industrial School for Girls in the same city. 
These schools were founded by the great Methodist 
missionary, Thomas Harwood, who spent half a cen- 
tury in New Mexico. When he first came into that 
territory, in 1870, he reported that “not a public 
schoolhouse could be found; hardly a Bible in one 
family in a thousand, and only a few other books; 
hardly a public road or a bridge; hardly an American 
plow, wagon, or buggy.” Seventy-three per cent of 
the people over ten years of age could not read, and 
seventy-eight per cent were unable to write. 

Even at the present day it is hard for a traveler 
in New Mexico to realize that he is in the United States. 


124 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


The ancient Indian pueblos, the little adobe houses, 
the reapers in the field stooping to cut with the sickle, 
the oxen treading out the grain, the corn ground by the 
women between two stones, the people journeying with 
their beds rolled up and carried on their backs, all 
seem to belong to an earlier civilization than ours and 
make us feel as though we had somehow strayed back 
through the gateway of the past into the long-ago. 

Up in the mountains, one may visit thriving com- 
munities of people where there is neither telephone nor 
doctor within thirty or forty miles, and groceries and — 
all manufactured goods must be hauled fifty miles or — 
more over mountain roads before reaching the cus- 
tomer. In such a village, scarcely anybody under- 
stands any language but Spanish. Indeed, even when’ 
we come down to Santa Fé, and visit the state legis- 
lature in session, we shall find that its business must 
be conducted in two languages, with interpreters to 
turn Spanish into English and English into Spanish. 

Yet these people are not chiefly Mexicans who 
have lately crossed the border, but American-born, 
often for generations. But they have been shut off 
from contact with American life and customs as we 
know them As late as 1910, over twenty per cent of 
the population could neither read nor write. Now, if 
we multiply this percentage by three or four, add to 
the illiteracy the superstitious beliefs of an earlier day, 
and take away even the few conveniences the people 
have at present, we shall get some picture of what Dr. 
Harwood and his wife found in New Mexico. 


A SHINING LIGHT 126 


Their first attempt was the organizing of the first — 
Sunday school recorded in that territory. Its place 
of meeting was an old adobe house with a dirt floor. 
Next they opened a day school with about thirty pupils. 
Meantime Dr. Harwood traveled far and wide on the 
back of a pony or in an old buckboard, covering many 
hundreds of miles in learning to know the people. He 
slept in their homes, learned to speak their language, 
and won their confidence. Today a chain of churches 
and missions, and the Biblical College and the School 
for Girls in Albuquerque, stand as memorials of his 
work. 

To this good and great missionary Ambrosio was 
sent, to enter school under his direction. At first the 
boy felt ill at ease, as if somehow the school might 
turn him into a preacher against his will. But soon 
he found that the boys he liked best were the sons of 
preachers; and as his love and admiration for Dr. 
and Mrs. Harwood grew and the teachings of the school 
began to have their effect on him, he felt more and 
more clearly that he could never carry out his uncle’s 
plan. Now, too, his grandfather’s words came back 
to him, and he decided that he would fulfil that good 
man’s wish, and become himself a preacher of God’s 
word. : 

After some years in the college, he was made a local 
preacher in 1895. At this time he was only twenty 
years old, and in his field of labor in the Albuquerque 
circuit, he showed so much interest in working among 
young people that he became known as the “Boys’ 


126 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


Preacher.” He helped to organize the first Epworth 
League for Spanish-speaking young people in New 
Mexico. In the year 1900 he became a regular pastor, 
and received his first appointment in the town of Clay- 
ton, near the Colorado border. 

While the youthful minister was getting acquainted 
with his new field, a young woman by the name of 
Marta Frances Garcia was teaching in a country 
school, only a short distance from Clayton. Like Am- 
brosio, Marta was American-born, of a Protestant 
family, and of Spanish descent, one of her ancestors . 
being Cabeza de Baca, or De Vaca, who was said to 
be the first European to set foot upon the soil of New 
Mexico, and about whom this romantic tale was told. 

After the conquest of Mexico by Cortes, so the 
story goes, the Spaniards in Mexico were very eager 
to penetrate the country to the northward because of 
a tradition that in that region lay the fabulous Seven 
Cities of Cibola, where even the doorsills and lintels of 
the houses were set with turquoises, and riches beyond 
description were stored. De Baca and a few com- 
panions made a journey into this unexplored territory 
in 1528, meeting with marvelous adventures. At one 
place, finding some sick Indians and undertaking to 
cure them, they became objects of such reverence to 
the tribe that they had great difficulty in getting away. 
The belief of the Indians in their power as sorcerers, 
as well as their interest in the articles they carried to. 
trade with, enabled them to travel all over the country 
which is now known as Texas, and over into the wilder- 


A SHINING LIGHT 127 


ness of New Mexico. De Baca suffered imprisonment 
among the Indians for seven or eight years, but at last 
escaped and got back to his comrades in Mexico. His 
tales fired their imaginations, and many of them went 
into the new land to explore and settle it, though they 
never found the fabled riches of the Seven Cities. 

Almost four hundred years later, a descendant of the 
discoverer, Ezekiel Cabeza de Baca, became governor 
of New Mexico, and this man was the great-uncle of 
the charming young teacher, Marta Garcia. 

It was not of the De Bacas, however, past or present, 
that Ambrosio Gonzales thought when he met the lovely 
and talented girl. In her he saw a vision and a purpose 
like his own, and he asked her to share his life-work. 
_ They were married in December, 1900. Mrs. Gonzales 
continued to teach for some years, first in the public 
schools, afterward in several mission schools. 

Mr. Gonzales served several pastorates in New 
Mexico; then in 1912 he was called to become the first 
Spanish-American pastor under the Methodist Board 
in California. -This was a new work when he took it 
up, in the town of Santa Ana. There was at first no 
church. There were no members, and only a few 
people were at all interested. But soon the work began 
to grow. An old Mormon church was bought, and 
large numbers of Mexicans began to attend it. The 
work has now spread and become established in a 
circle of neighboring towns and cities. From the one 
small mission twelve new preaching places have been 
developed. 


128 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


Mr. Gonzales later became pastor of a church in 
Pasadena which has had the remarkable record of a 
hundred per cent increase of membership in one year, 
with no losses. He served this church for seven years, 
until its growing demands caused his health to break. 
He is now in charge of a small but rapidly growing 
mission near Pasadena. | 

Work of this sort is of a different kind from that 
performed by Grandfather Ambrosio Gonzales among 
the Spanish-speaking people of New Mexico. In 
Grandfather Gonzales’ time the dwellers in the scat- — 
tered towns were largely of American birth. Some of 
them were not from old Mexico at all, but were de- 
scended from Mexico’s Spanish conquerors who settled 
in New Mexico; others were of Mexican families that 
moved many years before to our side of the border. 
Today an increasing number of our population are 
people who have been coming in as immigrants from 
Mexico during the last ten or fifteen years—that is, 
ever since the unsettled conditions in Mexico have 
driven her peopie out to seek security in the United 
States. Many thousands of these Mexicans are 
laborers who come to find work, or who have been 
imported as contract labor by American employers. 
Altogether, counting both the American-born Spanish- 
speaking people and the Mexican immigrants, we have 
now about a million and a half people in this country 
whose language is Spanish. 

In all the border states, and far up into other parts 
of the country, these Mexican immigrants are to be 


A SHINING LIGHT 129 


found. Many of them were admitted as laborers dur- 
ing the World War, to make up for the shortage of 
labor caused by the draft. Had they not come into 
the United States, many fertile parts of our Southwest 
would have deteriorated into desert country for want 
of cultivation. The Mexicans raise corn and cotton 
in Texas; they are the principal workers in the sugar- 
beet industry, from California to Michigan; they work 
in the orange and walnut groves and in the bean fields 
of Southern California; and they are coming to be con- 
sidered the finest florists on the Coast, even surpassing 
the Japanese. 

Agriculture is only one of the many occupations of 
the Mexicans in the United States. Thousands of them 
are employed on our railroads, making track, cleaning 
cars, and loading stock. ‘They herd immense numbers 
of cattle and sheep, caring for them alone in the wilder- 
ness where other workmen refuse to go. They are de- 
scribed as “natural miners,” proving very skilful in 
taking out coal, copper, gold, and silver, and many 
other ores. ‘They do road and construction work. 
Others are listed as “storekeepers, laundrymen, bar- 
bers, clerks, chauffeurs, printers, street-sweepers, news- 
venders, bootblacks, window-cleaners, gardeners, cob- 
blers, expressmen, meat-cutters, scrub-women, factory 
workers, ranchers, teamsters, carpenters, plumbers,” 
and so forth. There seems to be no form of industry 
to which the Mexican cannot turn his hand, and he has 
the reputation of being a steady, faithful worker. 

It is not only the men who come across the border; 


130 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


they bring their wives and children along—families 
of eight, nine or ten being common. They are very 
poor, coming with nothing but the clothes they wear, 
and crowding into the cheapest shacks they can find. 
Sometimes a dozen persons live in one room. In the 
Mexican quarter of the cities, where they are crowded 
together in houses usually without baths, often with 
no plumbing at all, health conditions naturally become 
very bad. When sickness comes, they shrink from the 
help they might receive in the hospitals, because of 
their superstitious fear of the fabled “black bottle,” a | 
draught from which, they believe, might put them out 

of the way and no one be any the wiser. 

Others, who have become the victims of drink, leave 
Jarge families to be cared for by charity. Those who, 
by ignorance of our language and laws, have been 
arrested unjustly, are in hapless case unless they find 
a friendly interpreter. In all these ways, the Mexican 
in the United States needs the aid of someone who can 
understand his language, and whose kindly sympathy 
will inspire him to spend time and care on the problems 
of the helpless immigrant. 

Such helpers have Mr. and Mrs. Gonzales been dur- 
ing all the time of their missionary labors. Being 
American citizens, and yet of Spanish blood, they form 
a link between the two races. On the one hand they 
gain the confidence of the Spanish-speaking people 
and gather them into school and church, and, on the 
other, they can enlist the interest of American Chris- 
tian people, who have given large sums to establish 


A SHINING LIGHT 131 


Bible and industrial schools for their Mexican neigh- 
bors. 

One of the successful experiments of Pastor Gonzales 
in Pasadena is a hotel for young Mexican men, in a 
building which was formerly a den of gambling Chinese 
and Greeks, who had been doing great harm among 
the Mexicans. Mr. Gonzales filled it with young men, 
all of whom attended the Pasadena church. Every 
day, during meal-times, one of their number read aloud 
from the Bible while the rest were eating. The pastor’s 
brother, Aaron, was in charge of this enterprise. 

Mr. and Mrs. Gonzales are always seeking to find 
among the younger people some who may be trained 
_ to spread the gospel and drive away the fears and 
superstitions that gather in the darkness of ignorance. 
They have been very successful in this work. Mr. 
Gonzales rejoices especially over five young men, four 
of them brought into Christian service while he was 
their pastor, who have now become preachers. 

One of these was a young man who had been a 
captain in the bandit army of Pancho Villa in Mexico. 
When Mr. Gonzales first found him among the work- 
men in a section house, the man was afraid to go to 
church on the pastor’s invitation. Gradually, however, 
his shyness was overcome, and he came to be a power 
among the young people in the League meetings, always 
ready to take part in any service and encouraging 
others to do the same. Now he is one of the most 
promising young preachers in the Latin-American Mis- 
sion in that district. 


132 LAND OF ALL NATIONS > 


Many stories could be told of the changes that have 
taken place in the lives of men and women through 
the very presence among them of a church where the 
services are conducted in their own language. One 
such story comes from the period when Mr. Gonzales 
was pastor of the little mission church in Santa Afa. 

One night, a Mexican was passing along the street 
with a hot and angry heart. Four years before, an- 
other Mexican had treated him very badly, and he 
had brooded over it all those years. The longer he 
thought of him, the more he hated the man who had 
wronged him; and at last he had come to the point 
where it seemed to him that he could no longer go on ~ 
living in the same world with his enemy. So he was 
going to the man’s house that night with weapons in 
his pockets to kill his enemy or be killed by him. 

As he passed the mission church, he heard sweet sing- 
ing and paused for a moment. The words were in his 
own language, and he listened to the end of the hymn. 
Then a man began to read from a book; this, too, was 
in Spanish instead of Latin, and the listener stayed to 
hear it. Next the man began to preach, and the ser- 
mon was all about brotherly love. Outside, in the 
dark, the angry heart of the injured man began to. 
soften, and then to turn away with horror from the 
thought of the dreadful thing he had been planning 
to do. He listened until the end of the service, and 
then went quietly home. 

Next day the man came to the parsonage and asked 
to see Pastor Gonzales. 


A SHINING LIGHT 133 


“Would you please read some more,” he said, “from 
that book you were reading in the church last night?” 

Mr. Gonzales took his Bible and began to read to 
the man. After listening for a while, the visitor drew - 
from his pockets a large revolver and a long Mexican 
knife and laid them on the minister’s desk, saying: 

“May I exchange these implements of death for a 
copy of that word of life?” 

Then he told the pastor the story of his great temp- 
tation and how he was saved from it by the words he 
had heard from the church the night before. 

“Let us go,” said Mr. Gonzales, who saw that the 
man’s heart was deeply touched, “and see that man 
who was your enemy, and ask him to become a friend.” 

So they went with words of friendship instead of 
deadly weapons; and soon the former enemies were 
asking forgiveness of each other. The families of both 
men began to come to the little mission, and the sons 
and daughters of the intended murderer have become 
very active and helpful workers in the church. 

There are still many whose minds and hearts are 
dark because of ignorance and wrong teaching; but the 
light that shone long ago for Don Ambrosio from the 
pages of the Book is being spread farther and farther 
each day by the labors of his grandson, who has chosen 
as his motto the words: 

“Let your light so shine before men that they may 
see your good works and glorify your Father which is 
in heaven,” 


VIiTl 
A SHUTTLE OF THE GREAT LOOM 


ARLY one Sabbath morning, the beadle, or crier, 
was going about the streets in the Jewish quarter 
of a Hungarian village, striking the doors with a 
hammer to waken the people in time to go to the syna- 
gogue. As he struck on one door, crying, “Uri, Uri!” 
(Awake, awake! ), a little new-born cry answered him 
from within the house. The little boy who was born 
just as the beadle called was known in the household, 
for some years after, by the nickname of “Uri.” 

He had another name, of course—that of his father, 
Edward Steiner. It was a name given him with many 
tears, for the father who had borne it before him had 
died some months earlier, stricken with cholera while 
helping to care for the sick in the village. This pesti- 
lence followed a battle, and was followed in its turn 
by famine. Robber bands passed through the town at 
night, and many Jewish homes were broken into and 
plundered. It was dangerous to be a Jew of a well- 
to-do family, as Edward’s people were. : 

In spite of this, the little boy was five years old be- 
fore he began to learn that he was different from any 
of his playmates. ‘The village children, Jew and Gen- 
tile, played together as friends, and Edward was on 
good terms with them all. He helped them with their 
work, gave them a share of his sweetmeats, and played 

134 


A SHUTTLE OF THE GREAT LOOM 1335 


in all their games. At Easter time he helped make 
willow switches and went around with the Gentile boys, 
threatening to whip the girls, who would buy them off 
with colored eggs. Edward’s mother and brother did 
not know that he took part in this particular Gentile 
diversion, nor that he helped one of the boys to ring 
the bell and pump the organ in the Lutheran church. 
But when they caught him dividing all the Sabbath 
apple-cake among his friends, they punished him 
severely. 

Angered by this punishment, he tried to run away 
with a company of village Catholics who were going 
on a pilgrimage to a neighboring town, where there was 
a sacred spring said to possess healing waters. It was 
then that he learned for the first time that he was not 
like the other children; for the driver of the wagon 
called him a “Schid” (Jew), and threw him out into 
the road. There his Uncle Isaac, who was his guard- 
ian, and a very strict orthodox Jew, found him and 
took him home to another punishment at the hands of 
his older brother. 

The next day his uncle, who was horrified when he 
found how Edward had been mingling with the Gen- 
tiles, began to teach him the Hebrew alphabet, and 
every day he took the boy to the synagogue for prayers, 
all of which Edward had to learn by heart out of the 
Jewish prayer-book. 

“My mind,” he says, “never was with the prayers, 
which I could not understand. My eyes wandered me- 
chanically up and down the walls. I knew how many 


136 LAND OF ALL NATIONS | 


cracks they had, and how many rivulets of moisture 
came down from where the roof had leaked. I could 
tell the exact number of spindles in the railing of the 
gallery which divided the women from the men, for 
I must have counted them a thousand times. When- 
ever my uncle caught my wandering eyes, he brought 
me back to the prayer-book by poking me in the ribs, 
at times very forcibly.” 

Edward would have much preferred to wander with 
his Gentile playmates, Catholic or Protestant, but there 
was a difference now. They had begun to call him 
“Schid”; and even when he ran away to play with 
them, he felt that he was not one of them. Besides, 
in a short time he began to go to a regular school for 
Jewish boys, when for the first time the Austrian gov- 
ernment sent to the village a teacher to start a school 
for the Jews. From this teacher Edward got for the 
first time an idea of what patriotism means, and he 
also got a glimpse of the great truth of the brother- 
hood of all men, so that wonderful thoughts of a world 
where all should be friends were rising in his mind, even 
while his former friends were rejecting his friendship. 

Then there came a bitter winter, when the snows 
were piled almost to the roofs of the peasants’ cottages, 
and a common danger united the people of the village. 

“No one asked: ‘Is this a Jew’s house or a Magyar’s 
isba? Is it the home of a Roman Catholic or of a 
Protestant, to which we are making a path?’ ” 

Just before Christmas, it was found that one of a 
group of boys who were to go about singing carols, 


A SHUTTLE OF THE GREAT LOOM 137 


dressed up as the three wise men, was snowbound in 
a distant farmhouse. The other boys offered to let him 
take the place of the absent wise man. 

Wonderful crowns and a star were manufactured 
from gilt paper, and Edward was secretly drilled in the 
Christmas hymn. He was to represent the wise man 
from the land of the Moors; so when he sallied out in 
red robe and gilded crown, his face was covered by a 
liberal coat of stove-polish. 

The “kings” made straight for the home of the Pany, 
the great man of the village, expecting fine gifts at this 
house, which looked like a palace to their eyes. 

The Pany, who was a rough, brutal man, greeted 
them harshly, and told them to get done with their 
mummery and be gone. Out of deference to the great 
man, the two Gentile boys promptly fell on their knees 
and began to sing their hymn. Edward remained 
standing, and, before the others were through singing, 
was in the midst of a fight with the Pany’s son, who was 
trying to make him kneel. “Ordinarily,” said Steiner 
in later years, “he would not have had a difficult task, 
but my wounded royal pride had given me unknown 
strength, and majestically I held my ground.” Finally 
the struggling youngsters rolled on the floor, but the 
Jewish boy was on top: 

The Pany rescued his son from the much-rumpled 
“king,””? and demanded of the victor why he wouldn’t 
kneel. 

“Because I am a king and not a peasant,” cried the 
boy, ‘‘and I won’t kneel to anyone.” 


138 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


Everybody laughed loudly, and the Pany hustled the 
royal visitor roughly down the broad stairs, speeding 
him with kicks and abuse. The child was trying to find 
his way out, half-blinded by the tears streaming down 
his blackened face, when a woman’s gentle hand 
touched him in the dark and drew him into a lighted 
room. It was the Pamy’s sister, a maiden lady as noted 
for her good works as was her brother for his rude- 
ness. She washed the little fellow’s face, straightened 
his disordered clothing, filled his pockets with nuts and 
sweets, and as she led him out, kissed him on the fore- 
head, saying, “Our Lord was a little Jewish boy, just 
like you.” Me bs 

Edward was sorely to need the memory of this Chris- 
tian gentlewoman in the days to come, for often the 
people of the village, both Catholics and Protestants, 
raided the Jewish quarter on the slightest excuse, 
breaking windows and threatening to drive the Jews 
out of the town whenever one of the hated race did- 
anything to displease them. So little of the true spirit 
of Christ did His followers display, that Edward wrote 
in later years, “Whenever I passed a cross I seemed 
to hear the Christ saying, ‘Get out of here, you little 
Jewish boy; you crucified Me!’” Of Jesus as the 
Friend and Helper of all men, the boy had not the 
faintest idea. 

One beautiful June Sabbath, Edward stayed away 
from the synagogue—to him a place of tiresome repeti- 
tions, where the Jewish business men bargained with 
each other between the chanting of the Psalms. Far 


EDWARD A. STEINER 


Our Lord was once a little Jewish boy like the lad who once 
played, among the Carpathian Mountains, the part of a ‘Wise 
Man of the East.” A professor now, in an American college, 
and wise in sympathy and humor, he 1s held by many Americans, 
both new and old, to be still a veritable Wise Man, but a Wise 
Man of both East and West. 











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ag: 






oe art 


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A SHUTTLE OF THE GREAT LOOM 139 


more real and dear to him was the simple worship of 
the home, where his pious mother would presently bless 
and light the Sabbath candles in preparation for the 
holy-day meal. Until it was time for her to do that, 
there wasn’t much to do. So it happened that he was 
loitering around the village that Sabbath morning, and 
was on hand to witness the arrival in the omnibus of a 
strange-looking man. “Three quarters of a man,” he 
declared himself; for a wooden leg and an empty sleeve 
appeared as the man left the vehicle, followed by a 
brass-bound trunk. The stranger was a Jew, a former 
townsman, who had run away to America and had 
fought and bled in the American Civil War. 

Edward was shocked to see a Jew drinking palenka, 
the native whisky, and to hear him order pork for his 
dinner. To save him from such apostasy, he invited 
him home on the spot, and his good mother, pitying 
the homeless man, asked him to stay and live with 
them. 

Out of the brass-bound trunk came various trea- 
sures—a huge American flag, a history of the Civil 
War, and a picture of a sad-faced man, which was hung 
on the wall of the old soldier’s room. Edward asked 
many questions, and soon learned that the man’s name 
was Abraham Lincoln. 

“How is it,” the boy inquired, “that this man, who 
was a Christian, was named Abraham?” 

. Then the soldier told him a wonderful story of a man 
with the faith of Abraham the patriarch, and a courage 
like that of Moses the liberator; a man who freed not 


140 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


his own people, but a strange race of black men, from 
slavery. 

The boy’s imagination was kindled by the tale. He 
applied it at once to the evils he saw about him—not 
only those of his own race, but those under which all 
his neighbors suffered. The government under which 
they lived was harsh and oppressive to the poor; the 
judge of the village was a man of evil life, who con- 
demned others for the things he openly did himself; 
and the police were cruel to those who were too poor 
to offer them bribes. A great longing to make things 
right arose in Edward’s heart. He gathered a group 
of boys in the synagogue yard and made them a speech, - 
trying to stir them to a promise that they would resist 
bad government and help the oppressed. The boys 
told the teacher, who gave the young revolutionist a 
whipping; and of all his great undertaking there was 
nothing left but bruises and a mournful comfort in 
looking at the picture of Lincoln and feeling some 
small share in his martyrdom. 

One day the omnibus brought to town some visitors 
very different from the old soldier—a Jewish family 
richly attired, flashing with diamonds, who had lived 
for a number of years in America and had become rich 
in the business of distilling whisky. The boys of this 
family were quite different from those of the Hun- 
garian village. They brought new games, new songs 
(including “Yankee Doodle”), and new books, chiefly 
Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, in an illustrated -Ger- 
man edition. A new world was opened to Edward. 


A SHUTTLE OF THE GREAT LOOM 141 


“T felt the glow of camp-fires, the joy of the chase, 
the hardships of adventure, the fierceness of battles and 
battle-cries. I drew the first plowshare over my prairie 
farm and defended my blockhouse against the red- 
skins.” 

When the family went back to America, Edward was 
almost heartbroken. He had made all his plans to go 
to America, and, in time, to marry Maud, the rich 
man’s daughter. He ran after the omnibus which car- 
ried them away and clung to it, only to be sent home 
in tears, and to receive the usual punishment from the 
heavy hand of his older brother. 

Even after this disappointment had lost its sharp- 
ness, the thought of America remained. He made 
another effort to reach it by running away with an epi- 
leptic boy from the poorhouse. He spent all his 
money paying a hackman to drive them to the nearest 
railway station, where they were arrested as vagrants 
when they tried to board the train without tickets. 
After a night spent in jail with gypsies and thieves, he 
was rather relieved to be found by his brother, who 
gave him the inevitable whipping and then bought him 
breakfast before starting home. 

This adventure made his mother decide to send him 
away to school; and it was not long before the omnibus 
carried him away to a distant town, where he attended 
a school taught by Jesuit fathers, though he was com- 
pelled by his religion to live in a Jewish family. Here 
he found plenty of hard mental discipline—“pages and 
pages of Latin, curious problems in mathematics, and 


142 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


such history as they deigned to give us. They were 
painful years,” he adds, in which he found little com- 
panionship and no satisfaction for the questions of his 
busy mind. These questions kept coming to the sur- 
face, and so greatly disturbed his teachers and class- 
mates that the rector openly praised the Lord when 
the troublesome Jewish youth passed his final exami- 
nations and said good-by. 

At the University of Heidelberg, to which he now 
went, he formed close friendships with a number of 
Russian students, who were always ready to sit up 
with him into the morning hours “vehemently discuss- 
ing everything under the heavens.’”’ From them he . 
learned to know Russian literature, and during one of 
his vacations he made a pilgrimage which opened new 
doors of thought—a journey into Russia to visit Tol- 
stoy, the famous Russian nobleman, soldier, courtier 
and author, who laid aside all these things to live the 
life of a peasant in order to do, as he saw it, the will 
of God and to carry out the teachings of the Man of 
Nazareth. . 

From this earnest man he first heard the words of | 
Jesus uttered without bitterness or narrowness. What 
surprised him was that Tolstoy’s remedy for the ills 
of life was so exceedingly simple. Within himself, said 
Tolstoy, was the secret, and it was “‘to like the unlike, 
to love the unlovely, to regard wealth, place, honor, 
of no import, and to believe that the purpose of life 
is to do God’s will.” 

One day they went out to the field, where the faa 


A SHUTTLE OF THE GREAT LOOM 143 


man took a scythe and cut grain with the peasants. 

“Try it,” he said to Edward; and after the young 
student had made some clumsy attempts and was wip- 
ing his perspiring face, Tolstoy said: ‘Young man, for 
a few minutes, at least, you have been doing the will 
of God. He has not made your hands merely to hold 
gloves and a cane and cigarettes, but to do useful, 
honest work.” 

But the greatest lesson that Tolstoy taught him was 
the oneness of all men. 

“You are a Jew, I am a Russian,” he would say to 
him; “yet I feel no difference in the touch of your 
hands, in the look of your eyes, and hear none as you 
speak to me. There are differences in the color of the 
skin, the shape of the nose and eyes, but beneath the 
surface we are all alike.” And the way to bring this 
sense of brotherhood into all men’s lives, he said, was 
the way of self-sacrifice: “Give everything, and ask 
nothing in return.” 

This visit made an impression on Edward’s mind 
which he never lost. From that day forward his motto 
was, “All men are one.” 

The student was not to finish his university course. 
One year when he was at home for the spring vaca- 
tion, a copyist from the office of the village judge came 
to his mother and offered for a certain sum to tell her 
an official secret, which would save her boy from arrest 
and punishment. Edward, whose sympathies were 
always with the poor and oppressed, may very easily 
have said something at one time or another that might 


144 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


be understood as disloyal to the Austrian government 
which was never noted for impartial justice to all; but 
that the state could be seriously disturbed by the words 
of a nineteen-year-old boy was probably a fiction of the 
copyist’s own mind, eager to make money by playing 
on a mother’s fears. The man promised to keep the 
secret till the boy was safely across the border. In 
three days after leaving home, Edward Steiner was on 
the ocean, bound for America. 3 

In those days—for this was about forty years ago— 
nobody bothered much about the comfort of immi- 
grants crossing the sea. Into a space so small for the 
number of people it held that it was almost impossible 
to walk about, these poor travelers were packed like 
cattle. On stormy days, when the hatches were closed, 
the odors of the place became unbearable. Cleanliness 
was impossible, soap and water were luxuries scarcely 
to be had. On one vessel, drinking water for the steer-— 
age had to be stolen at night from the second cabin. 

The food was miserable—chiefly soup made in im- 
mense kettles, and served in tin pails, with bread often 
so ill-baked as to be uneatable. Steiner says that 
though the steerage pays about one third as much 
passage money as the first cabin, it receives less than . 
one per cent of sheltered deck space, not ten per cent 
of food value, and nothing in the way of courtesy or 
civility. 

“And yet,” he adds,—and he learned this on his first 
voyage,—“‘the steerage holds a luxury which is grow- 
ing rarer and rarer in the cabin—good fellowship.”’ 


A SHUTTLE OF THE GREAT LOOM 145 


There were days of storm, when the terrified steerage 
passengers, under closed hatches among rattling chains 
and groaning.planks, with water coming down the ven- 
tilators, thought their last hour had come. There was 
dreadful seasickness, with nobody to tell them that 
they were not going to die of it. And then there were 
calm and sunny days when they lay on the crowded 
deck drying their damp clothing by the steam-pipes, 
and starry nights when somebody would play an accor- 
dion and the folk-songs of many nations would be 
chanted hoarsely by the reviving wanderers. Some- 
times they would even try to dance a mazurka or a 
czardas in a little cleared space. 

There was prayer, too, in the steerage—devout 
Catholics telling their beads, Protestants humming their 
hymns, and a little group of faithful Jews gathering in 
a corner to sing their welcome to the Sabbath, with 
their faces, as nearly as they could tell, toward Jeru- 
salem. There were unselfish and helpful deeds as the 
stronger yielded the best places, now and again, to the 
weaker. There was sympathy as one after another 
told the tale of poverty or persecution which was driv- 
ing him to the new country. 

And then, one day, there was quiet from the tossing 
of waves and a breathless silence in the steerage as its 
passengers looked across the water to the land that was 
soon to receive them. Then a rapture of joy—America 
at last! Hands were grasped, farewells were said, and 
the travelers disembarked upon a strange shore, to find 
the place of their fortune or their failure. 


146 LAND OF ALL NATIONS | 


None of them all came with less cheerful prospects 
than young Edward Steiner. Knowing no English, with 
very little money, trained to no trade or profession, his 
one possession was a knowledge of a number of Euro- 
pean languages, with a natural ability for language 
study. Of American ways he knew little. 

His first purchase on landing was five cents’ worth 
of bananas which he proceeded to eat with the skins 
on, nobody having told him any better. At his first 
meal at a lodging-house table, he meekly waited to have 
things handed to him, while the rest of the boarders 
gobbled everything. After he had paid for his supper 
and a night’s lodging, he was left penniless; and the 
next day lived on ice-water, which was the only thing 
in the country he had so far found to be free. 

All that day he wandered the streets looking for 
work. When evening came, he remembered that his 
mother had given him the address of a distant relative 
living in New York and he started out to find the 
place. The relative proved very distant indeed, for the 
tired boy walked over eighty blocks before he reached 
the house. He received a kind welcome, and a supper 
that tasted delicious after his day of fasting, and fell 
asleep in his chair while trying to answer all the ques- - 
tions asked him. 

The following day, with a borrowed capital of 
twenty-five cents, he started down-town again to look 
for work. He visited about twenty hotels, only to be 
told they didn’t need any Dutchmen. At one hotel he 
might have had a job assisting the bartender, but 


A SHUTTLE OF THE GREAT LOOM 147 


_he refused, having always a dislike for liquor and its 
traffic. 

When he returned to his relatives at night, he was 
still without employment; but next day they secured 
him a job in a sweat shop where he was taught to guide 
a hot iron over cloaks. The iron weighed ten or fifteen 
pounds when he began, but by noon he was sure it 
weighed a ton. Worse than the unaccustomed work 
was the angry tongue of the red-haired Irish fore- 
woman. “I was a presser, but she was the oppressor,” 
he says; and when he scorched a garment that after- 
noon, he felt scorched all over by the time she was 
through with him. 

When at last the end of the week arrived, the three 
dollars and fifty cents in his pay envelope made him 
supremely happy. He had also hope of better things; 
for some friendly fellow workers had directed him to a 
night school to study English, assuring him of a better 
job when he had learned it. 

Unfortunately, the first person on whom he tried the 
new language was the Irish forewoman; and using, in 
his innocence, some English he “had learned out of 
school,”’ he found to his amazement that she went in a 
rage to the boss, with the result that his next pay 
envelope bore a new English sentence, with which he 
was to grow only too familiar—‘“‘Your services are no 
longer required.” 

By the aid of some of the other pressers he got an- 
other job, this time as a cutter. He worked at this job 
about a month, going to night school every evening, 


148 LAND OF ALL NATIONS | 


after a ten-hour working day. Then a “slack time” 
came, and again the pay envelope bore the unwelcome 
words. After that he worked by turns in a baker’s 
shop, a feather-renovating establishment, and a sau- 
sage factory, earning barely enough to live on and be- 
coming more discouraged every day. 

Somewhere he had read the advice, “Go West, young 
man,” and he determined to get away from New York. 
He crossed to Jersey City and bought a ticket as far 
as his money would take him, which was only to Prince- 
ton Junction. There he slept on the platform of the 
freight station, never dreaming that he was within sight 
of a great university where he would one day lecture 
with distinguished honors. 

Next day he knocked at a farmhouse door and asked 
for work. The farmer proved to be a man who “spe- 
cialized in greenhorns,” getting their labor as cheap 
as possible and making of his farm “a new kind of 
sweat-shop.” But the German housekeeper, Maria, 
took a fancy to the new hand, and when she discovered 
his love for books, she borrowed them for him from 
the farmer’s library. The farmer caught him with 
some one day, and, though angry at first, promised 
finally to take him to the university in the fall and see 
what could be done for him there. 

This promise kept the young man at the farm for 
some months, in spite of many discomforts, including 
the painful effort to do the cooking after Maria left. 
One day he walked to Princeton and actually rang the 
president’s doorbell; but it was vacation time, and 


A SHUTTLE OF THE GREAT LOOM 149 


nobody was at home, Finally he left the farm, unable 
to stand its exactions any longer. With ten dollars 
in his pocket, he took to the road again. 

A young Russian Jew, selling tinware, overtook him 
and offered him a partnership. In the morning the 
peddler had disappeared, leaving the tinware, but tak- 
ing with him Steiner’s ten dollars. The deserted part- 
ner carried the tinware almost to Philadelphia, and 
finally disposed of it for a few dollars to a hotel-keeper 
in a small town. Entering Philadelphia, he walked the 
streets for miles in search of the one thing there he 
most desired to see—the Liberty Bell. 

He left again by train that evening, expecting to go 
as far as his money would carry him. The conductor 
put him off late at night among the tobacco fields of 
eastern Pennsylvania, and once more he found a farmer 
to employ him. © 

Here he worked till autumn, and then moved west- 
ward again, this time to a’steel mill in “darkest Pitts- 
burgh,”’ where he pushed an immense hot caldron from 
a room whose temperature was over two hundred de- 
grees out into a cold shed, so that his hands were 
often scorched by the heat while his feet were nearly 
frozen. At the end of the day, he says, ‘‘All my senses 
seemed to go to sleep at once,” and he lay too utterly 
exhausted to care for anything but rest, in a crowded, 
stuffy boarding house where any kind of a bath was 
an almost impossible luxury. 

From steel to coal was his next move. In Connells- 
ville he found work in an underground “world of men 


150 LAND OF ALL NATIONS. 


and mules,” where he labored as a helper for a dollar 
a day. Soon there came a strike, and while trying to 
go to work he was seized by strikers, beaten and left 
insensible, and woke to find himself in the county jail. 
There he was kept six months because an old, rusty 
revolver was found on him—the gift of a dying man he 
had befriended in Pittsburgh. 

After his final release, penniless, he set out to tramp 
to Chicago, working at various things by the way. His 
chief impression of Chicago was of solid blocks of 
saloons, with whirling wheels of chance to strip the last 
penny from the pockets of their frequenters. He 
worked there first at digging cellars, later in a ma- 
chine shop. And there he found friends among the 
Bohemians, before whom—in a saloon—he made his 
first public speech on the teachings of Tolstoy. 

More strikes and riots, and scarcity of employment 
drove him forth again into the great harvest fields of 
Minnesota. Here he found work with a well-educated 
farmer whose family made friends with him and whose 
evening household prayers touched him strangely; 
though because he was still under the influence of cer- 
tain skeptical books, he was at that time averse to all 
religion. Here, in this quiet household, he began to 
dream of a peaceful farm life on broad and fertile 
acres of his own. But the hatvesting was soon over, 
and once more he moved—this time to a mining town 
in Illinois where he lived and worked among Slovak 
laborers for whom he started English classes, wrote 
letters, and did all manner of generous things. 


A SHUTTLE OF THE GREAT LOOM 151 


His next move was to a near-by city where he worked 
in a factory owned by the head of the Jewish family 
who had brought to his home town a glimpse of the 
wonders of America. One of the sons was manager, 
but none of the family recognized him. When he got 
up courage to call upon them, he found that even Maud 
had forgotten him; but when he was recalled to their 
memory, they treated him kindly and offered to help 
him find better employment. On one of his visits, they 
proposed his studying law. He gave his reasons against 
it so fluently that Maud remarked in jest, “He talks 
like a rabbi!” 

This was a suggestion that was taken seriously by 
the family, who urged him to go to a Hebrew college. 
He felt that his religious views were not such as a 
rabbi should hold; but they pressed him at least to 
go and study, suggesting that he might become a 
teacher if he did not wish to be a rabbi. Persuaded at 
last, he did finally start east to the college, working 
his way by labor on a cattle train. 

On the way a rough Irish youth, who had robbed him 
and had been threatened with arrest when they reached 
their destination, tripped him one evening as he was 
running on top of the moving train. Steiner fell from 
the car and rose with a painfully injured leg, to limp 
into a little town near by. While recovering, an in- 
fluential Jewish woman helped him to a clerkship, and 
here at last he found a chance for real mental life. 
He gathered a small library in the back of the store, 
bought a microscope, and started a Natural Science 


152 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


Club. He also taught a modern-language class organ- 
ized by the public school-teachers. He found other 
chances to use his knowledge of languages to help 
many immigrants who had to change cars at the town, 
which was a junction point, and presently the town 
officials began to use him in cases concerning people 
who spoke foreign languages. 

But best of all was the contact with Christian people 
who made religion a matter of daily practice. He 
began to attend a church whose pastor, and also the 
pastor’s wife, seemed to him real examples of Christian _ 
character. | | 

Yet he hesitated to change his faith. Then he met a 
young woman of Jewish birth, whose parents had be- 
come earnest and active Christians. The story of their 
sincere, unselfish life convinced him that a Jew can 
really become a Christian without losing what is best 
in his own faith. From that time his way was clear. 

‘“‘When one meets Jesus of Nazareth,” he says, “there 
is no way back; there are new marching orders, and 
they call ‘F duwardt? 4s 

Not long afterward, the man who had started to bi 
a rabbi was a student for the Christian ministry. At 
the first service he attended in Oberlin College chapel, 
the Scripture was the saying of St. Paul about those 
who “are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow- 
citizens.” It seerned to Edward Steiner as if the text 
had been chosen expressly for him. 

Those words rang again in his memory a few months 


A SHUTTLE OF THE GREAT LOOM 153 


later, when he walked seven miles from Oberlin to the 
county seat to receive his papers as an American citi- 
zen. He was part of America now—oi the land of 
brotherhood for all; but brotherhood, he had learned, 
could be found only in the fellowship of Jesus Christ. 

As a minister in the various parishes he served, his 
passion was always the helping of the man who was 
down—the poorest and neediest, particularly new- 
comers in America. His own experiences had made him 
familiar with almost every trouble and difficulty of the 
immigrant, and it was his delight to serve such lonely 
and bewildered foiks. Sometimes his congregation did 
not see the duty as he did and objected to having the 
needs of the immigrant brought to their attention and 
the foreigner seated in their pews. Then he would 
leave them and go elsewhere. 

He began to use his vacations for trips to Europe 
and back in the steerage, to study more closely its con- 
ditions and their remedy.. He brought abuses to the 
attentions of the immigration authorities; befriended 
every class and nationality on the voyage and at the 
port; and began the writing of the series of books 
which has made him known as an authority on immi- 
gration problems. Best known of these are On the 
Trail of the Immigrant, The Immigrant Tide, its Ebb 
and Flow, and his own story, From Alien to Citizen. 
Beside this he has lectured all over the country, trying 
to make us older Americans see our duty and privilege 
in helping newcomers. He shows us the immigrant as 


154 LAND OF ALL NATIONS 


he is—neither a beast nor a hero, but just a human 
being like ourselves, who will make a good or a bad 
citizen according to the treatment he gets from us. 

Not all of this happened at once. It began while he 
was in the active ministry, but has reached its height 
since he became Professor of Applied Christianity in 
Grinnell College, Iowa, about twenty years ago. He 
has crossed the ocean to Europe and back more than 
thirty times in the interest of the immigrant of every 
nationality. He has taken groups of young Americans 
abroad with him to study the races sympathetically in 
their Old World surroundings. : 

He compares himself to a shuttle in the hands of » 
the Master Weaver, thrown back and forth across the 
sea to weave the Old World and the New together. 
With his gift for speaking many languages and his 
greater gift of sympathy with all kinds of people, he 
has truly woven many threads of friendship and help- 
fulness that can never be broken. 

“If a good fairy,’ he writes, “were to come from 
the fairyland of my childhood, and were to ask me to 
make three wishes, and she would grant them ail, I 
could make but one wish. Not for wealth, though I 
could use it; not for strength, although I need it; not. 
for wisdom, although I lack it. My one wish, and this 
the fairies cannot grant me, would be that I may have 
grace given me to be a man to the end, and to the end 
love my brother man with all the passion of my soul.” 





